In the spring of 1856, I met with Mr. Christy acci- dentally in an omnibus at Havana.He had been in Cuba for some months, leading an adventurous life, visiting sugar-plantations, copper-mines, and coffee-estates, de- scending into caves, and botanizing in tropical jungles, cruising for a fortnight in an open boat among the coralreefs, hunting turtles and manatis, and visiting all sorts of people from whom information was to be had, from foreign consuls and Lazarist missionaries down to retired slave- dealers and assassins.As for myself, I had been travelling for the best part of a year in the United States, and had but a short time since left the live-oak forests and sugar-plantations of Louisiana.We agreed to go to Mexico together; and the present notes are principally compiled from our memorandum-books, and from letters written home on our journey.B anahuac.Before we left Cuba, however, we made one last ex- cursion across the island, and to the Isla de Pinos-the Isle of Pines-off the southern coast.A volante took us to the railway-station.The volante is the vehicle which the Cubans specially affect ; it is like a Hansom cab, but the wheels are much taller, six and a half feet high, and the black driver sits postillion-wise upon the horse.Our man had a laced jacket, black leather leggings, and a pair of silver spurs fastened upon his bare feet, which seemed at a little distance to have well polished hoots on, they were so black and shiny.The railway which took us from Havana to Batabano had some striking peculiarities.For a part of the way the track passed between two walls of tropical jungle.The Indian fig trees sent down from every branch suckers, like ANAHUAC.Havana, and found him hard at his work, which was the superintendence of several of the charitable institutions of the city-the Foundling Hospital, the Lunatic Asylum, and others.His life was one of incessant labour, and indeed people said he was killing him self with over-work, but he seemed always in the same state of chronic hilarity ; and when he took us to see the hospitals, the children and patients received him with demonstrations of great delight.I should not have said so much of our friend the Padre, were it not that I think there is a moral to be got out of him.I believe he may be taken as a type, not indeed of Roman Catholic missionaries in general, but of a certain class among them, who are of considerable importance in the missionary world, though there are not many of them.Taking the Padre as a sample of his class, as I think we mayjudging from the accounts of them we meet with in books, it is curious to notice, how the point in which their system is strongest is just that in which the Protestant system is weakest, that is, in social training and deportment.What a number of men go to India with the best intentions, and set to work at once, flinging then-doctrines at the natives before they have learnt in the least to under- stand what the said natives' minds are like, or how they work,-dropping at once upon their pet prejudices, mortally offending them as a preliminary step towards arguing with them ; and in short, stroking the cat of society backwards in the most conscientious manner.By the time they have accomplished this satisfactory result, a man like our Cuban Padre, though he may have argued but little and preached even less, would have a hundred natives bound to him by strong personal attachment, and ready to accept anything from him in the way of teaching.We paid a regular round of visits to the Floridan settlers, and were delighted with their pleasant simple ' e * Ahuehuete, pronounced a-hwe-liwete.
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