tallness of the doors, however, was balanced
by the shortness of the beds. My companion
was a long way over six feet in height, and the
ghost of the celebrated Procrustes might have
eyed him as his very long limbs lay on that
very short pallet, and longed to reform his
tailor's bills by snipping off some superfluous
inches of his anatomy. As to my bed, it was
as the couch of Dryden's Codrus—short, and
hard, and miserable; the poet's bed, in fact,
and a fit preparation for the flagstone, and the
kennel, and the grave.

But the Procrustean eye couldn't have seen
that long-limbed captain overhanging the short
bed. Why?  Because, when the folding-doors
were shut, all, save a bright streak of sun or
moonlight at their base, was utter darkness,
and as soon as we kindled our wax tapers at
night the gnats or the moths, the bats or the
scorpions, came and flapped them out. I don't
know how the Cuban belles contrive to get
through their toilettes. I think they must
hang up screens of shawls in the patios, and
come out into the open to beautify themselves.
A Cuban bedroom is not a place whither you
can retire to read or write letters. You may
just stumble into it, feel your way to the bed,
and, throwing yourself down, sleep as well as
you can for the mosquitoes. Besides, the best
part of your sleeping is done in Cuba out of
your bedroom—in a hammock slung between
the posts of a piazza, or on a mattress flung
down anywhere in the shade, or in anybody's
arm-chair, or in the dark corner of any café, or
anywhere else where the sun is not, and you
feel drowsy. In Algiers, the top of the house,
with a sheet spread between two poles by way
of awning, is still the favourite spot for an
afternoon nap, as it was in the time of the
Hebrew man of old; but in Havana the house-
tops slant, and are tiled, and so are left to their
legitimate occupants, the cats.

Our folding-doors proved but a feeble barrier
against the onslaughts of a horse belonging to
the proprietor of El Globo, and whose proper
stabling was in a cool grot, with a vaulted roof,
a kind of compromise between an ice-house, a
coal-hole, and a wine-cellar. This noble animal,
seemingly under the impression that he lived at
number five—our number—made such terrific
play with his hoofs against our portals on the
night of our stay, that, remonstrating, we
were promoted to a room up-stairs, windowless,
of course, but the door of which opened on the
covered gallery surrounding the patio. This
dwelling, likewise, had the great advantage of
not being plunged in Cimmerian darkness
directly the door was closed, for it boasted a
kind ot hutch, or Judas-trap, in one of the panels,
after the fashion of the apertures in the doors of
police-cells, through which cautious inspectors
periodically peep, to make sure that female
disorderlies have not strangled themselves in their
garters. You might look from this hutch, too,
if you chose, and present to the outside
spectator the counterpart of the infuriated old
gentleman, presumably of usurious tendencies,
in Rembrandt's picture, who thrusts his head
through the casement, and grins at and
exchanges glances with the young cavalier who has
called to mention that he is unable to take up
the bill.

Never, in the course of my travels, did I
light upon such a droll hotel as El Globo. You
paid about thirty shillnigs a day for accommo-
dation which would have been dear at half-a-
crown, but the balance was amply made up to
you in fun. I had been living for months at the
Bevoort House in New York, the most
luxurious hotel, perhaps, in the world, and the
change to almost complete barbarism was as
amusing as it was wholesome. Amusing, for
long-continued luxury is apt to become a very
great bore—wholesome, because the discomfort
of the Cuban hotels forms, after all, only an
intermediate stage between the splendour of the
States and the unmitigated savagery of Mexico
and Spain. I was fated to go further and fare
worse than at El Globo. Our quarters there
were slightly inferior to those to be found for
fourpence in a lodging-house in St. Giles's; but
I was destined to make subsequent acquaintance
at Cordova, at Orizaba, at Puebla in America,
and in Castile and in Andalusia in Europe,
with other pigsties to which that Havana was
palatial.

I am so glad that there was no room at
Madame Alme's, and that we did not try
Legrand's. I should have missed the sight of that
patio at El Globo. It was open to the sky, of
course; that is to say, the four white walls
were canopied all day long by one patch of
blazing ultramarine. A cloud was so rare, that
when one came sailing over the expanse of blue,
a sportsman might have taken it for a bird and
had a shot at it. I used often to think, leaning
over the balusters of the gallery, how intolerable
that bright blue patch would become at
last to a man cooped up between the four white
walls of a southern prison; for suffering may
be of all degrees, and anguish bear all aspects.
There is a cold hell as well as a hot one. I
have seen the horrible coop under the leads of
the Doge's palace at Venice, in which Silvio
Pellico spent so many weary months. But he,
at least, could see the roofs of the houses
through his dungeon bars, and hear the
gondoliers wrangling and jesting between the
pillars, or uttering their weird cries of warning
as they turned the corners of the canals.
He could hear the plashing of the water as
the buckets were let down into the wells in the
court-yard by the Giant's Staircase, and some-
times, perhaps, a few of the historical pigeons
would come wheeling up from the cornices of
the Procuratie Vecchie, and look at him in his
cell pityingly. But only to gaze on four white
burning walls, and a great patch of ultramarine,
and the chains eating into your limbs all the
while! Think of that. How the captive must
long for the sky to be overcast, or for rain
to fall—and it falls but once a year; and what
a shriek of joy would come out of him were he
to see, high aloft in the ultramarine, a real live