Mark's," I cried to the gondolier; "and lie
there, old Spain," I continued, apostrophising
two or three ripples which played above the
deed that I had done, as though murder were a
thing to laugh at—" lie there; and the fishes
may feed on you till I need your bones, and
dredge you up again." Old bones have their
uses. Professor Liebig once stated that all
Europe was ransacked to supply England with
bones. I have marked the spot where my
skeleton lies, full fathom five.

But I could not, somehow, go back to Havana.
Cuba was coy. She floated in the air; she
danced; she smiled at me, but she would not
be embraced. Like unto those strange apparitions
which mock the shepherd's sight on the
Westmoreland fells, now seeming as the form
of one that spurs his steed midway along a hill,
desperate, now merging into a gorgeous train
of cavaliers, with glittering armour and waving
standards, and now fading into vaporous
nothingness, I could see, remote, intangible, the
phantom of the Antilles; the burnished sun,
the coral glowing beneath the dark blue water;
the smooth black sharks waiting about the
bathing-places, and raging at the walls of
plants; the waving palms, the sanguinolent
bananas, the orange and pine-apple groves of
the rich island. But she would not approach
me then. You cannot always make of your
mind an indexed ledger which you can open at
will, and, under the proper letter, at the proper
page, and in the proper column, find the matter
you want, set down with clerk-like accuracy,
uuderruled with red, and ticked off with blue
ink. There are seasons when you mislay the
key of the ledger, or find the leaves blotted,
the index blurred, the entries effaced. Some-
times the firm your transactions with which you
are desirous of recalling has gone bankrupt,
and the accounts are being unravelled by Messrs.
Coleman, Turquand, and Young. Cuba, in
short, would not come at call, and it was not
until I embarked on the Adriatic, and went
over to Trieste, whence, as you know, there are
steamers starting continually for all parts of the
world, that I began to feel a little tropical again,
and find my memory.

The sea air did me good, and once more I
began to remember ocean voyages and hot climes.
But out upon that capricious memory and the
skittish tricks it served me! Like Leigh
Hunt's pig, it went down "all manner of
streets," always excepting the very one I wished
it to enter. " Softly now, old girl," I whispered
coaxingly, and strove to tickle it towards the
Morro Castle. Would you believe it, the vicious
jade bolted right across the Mediterranean Sea,
into the port of Algiers, and took me to a cockfight.
"Soho! " I said again, still trying soothing
measures; " this way, Memory, a little to
the left; now to the right; now straight on,
and hey for the Gulf of Mexico!" Alas! when
I had got Memory in mid-Atlantic, she turned
to the north instead of the south, bore me up
the River St. Lawrence, and cast me on the
stony marge of Cuagnawagha. By dint of
herculean efforts I got the brute back to
Vienna, in Austria; and, as luck would have it,
hearing that a contingent of Austrian volunteers,
bound to Mexico, was about to set sail, I
hurried my Memory down to the coast, intending
to leave her at Havana en route for Vera Cruz.
At the eleventh hour a sharp note from Mr.
Seward to Mr. Motley put a stop to the embarkation
of the contingent destined to help
Maximilian, the imperial gentleman in difficulties;
but my Memory managed to get on board a
transport in despite of the American taboo; and
after one of the shortest passages on record,
brought up safely in the Fonda called El Globo,
Bishopsgate-street, Havana.

They gave us a double-bedded room.
Double-bedded! The apartment itself would
have afforded ample quarters to five-and-twenty
dragoons, horses, forage and all. It was very
like a barn, and had an open timber roof, very
massive, but very primitive in its framework.
The beams, it is true, were of cedar, and smelt
deliciously. I had no means of ascertaining the
peculiar hue of the walls or of the floor, for
beyond a narrow parallelogram of sunshine
thrown on the latter, when the doors were open,
the apartment was quite dark. It was one of a
series surrounding the patio, or court-yard; and
the Cuban architects hold that windows in rooms
which do not look upon the street are mere
superfluities. Their constant care, indeed, is not
to let the daylight in, but to keep the sun out.
The consequence is, that a room in a Cuban
house is very like a photographic camera on a
large scale. Magnify by twenty the pretty
fresco-painted little dens which open out of the
court-yard in the Pompeian house at the Crystal
Palace, and you will have some idea of our
double-bedded room at El Globo. By-the-by,
you must forget to sweep it, and you must be
rather liberal in your allowance of fleas. What
matter? I dare say there were fleas in the house
of the Tragic Poet, notwithstanding all the fine
frescoes, and that the Pompeian housemaids
were none too tidy.

I was told afterwards that I might consider
myself very lucky not to find in this double-
bedded room such additional trifles as a cow in
one corner and a wheeled carriage in another.
Spaniards, old or new, are but faintly averse
from making a sleeping apartment of a stable
or a coach-house. I was slow to believe this;
and it was only lately, after some wayside
experiences in Andalusia, and having shared a room
with a pedlar's donkey, and being awakened in
the morning by the hard, dry, sardonic see-saw
of his horrible bray, that I realised to the fullest
extent the strangeness of the bedfellows with
which misery and the teetotum existence make
us acquainted.

Of the altitude of the folding-doors leading
into this cave there was no complaint possible.
I came to the conclusion that El Globo had
formerly been a menagerie, and our room the
private apartment of the giraffe, who, it is well
known, is a very proud animal, and will never
submit to the humiliation of stooping. The