we found a number of Creole Spaniards at work
busily designing on stone the fantastic devices
and pretty little vignettes, enveloped in which
the far-famed cigaritos of La Honradez go forth
to the world. The workmen who print these
designs in colours, and manage a very elaborate
steam lithographic press (made, as I deciphered
from a cast-iron inscription, at Pittsburg,
Pennsylvania, United States), are a very odd kind of
people indeed. They are not negroes, they are
not mulattoes, they are not quadroons, still less
are they criollos or Creole Cubans, or Peninsulares,
that is to say, European Spaniards. They
are not precisely slaves; yet they cannot
exactly be termed free. There is one of these odd
workmen perched on a high stool by the side
of the machine, and intent on adjusting the pins
to the due and proper register of one of the
coloured wrappers. He is a limber-limbed
young fellow, very thin, with very long slender
fingers, the which, with patient deftness, he
knows well how to use. His complexion is of
uniform pale saffron, of the texture of parchment,
and he is perfectly beardless. He has
very long lustrous black hair falling over his
shoulders. In the centre of his countenance,
which, in its yellow smoothness does not ill
resemble a boiled batter-pudding, show, like
currents in the said pudding, a pair of little sharp
black eyes. His forehead is very low, his cheekbones
are very high, and about his lips there
lingers continually a scarcely definable yet
ineffable simper of complacent beatitude, due,
perhaps, to an inward consciousness of merit,
or to opium, or to sheer innate imbecility.

Where have you seen that parchment face,
those eyes, that upturned calmly conceited
smirk, before? On a tea-tray? On a
teachest? On a fan? On a rice-paper view of the
Porcelain Pagoda at Nankin? To whom,
in fine, should those features and that expansion
belong, but to a brother of the sun and
moon, a native of the flowery land, a denizen
of the Celestial empire? They appertain,
indeed, here to a Chinese coolie. Where, you may
ask, are his shaven poll and his pigtail? That
question is easily answered. The coolies in
Havana let their hair grow, and are soon persuaded
to discard their unbrella hats, nankeen knickerbockers,
and bamboo shoes, for the ordinary cool
white linen habiliments of the West Indies.
More than this, and, strange enough to say,
they do, as a rule, submit to be baptised, to
change their Celestial designations for names
taken from the Christian hagiology, and so
become, to all outward appearance, very decent
Roman Catholics. Among Protestants, in
California and Australia, the Chinaman clings
most tenaciously to his native idolatry and
his native customs, which are very nasty.
He sticks to his tail, he sets up his joss-
house, he burns perfumed paper to the gods of
genteel morals, he eats with chopsticks, and
even imports dried ducks and other culinary
nastiness from Canton or Chusan to feed upon.
But in Cuba, no sooner does he submit his
pigtail to the barber's shear, and allow the priest to
change his name from Kwang-Lew-Fung to José
Maria, than he becomes at least as good a Christian
as the negro: which is not saying much.
To the end of the chapter, however, he remains
essentially an odd fish. He is a capital workman,
patient, cheerful, cunning, and industrious
enough when he chooses; but he does
not always choose, and is subject to capricious
intervals of monkey-like laziness, and of a
disposition to mutiny: always in a restless, spiteful,
monkey-like manner. It is quite useless to
reason with him, for he has his own notions of
logic and his own code of ethics. By the law
he cannot be flogged; but his masters
sometimes take the law into their own hands. If he
be thrashed, he goes out and commits suicide.
He whose forefathers may have been over-civilised
some thousands of years ago, and the
negro who seems never to have been civilised
at all since the world began, are about the
most hopelessly impracticable beings ever
created to be the curse and despair of
philanthropists and missionaries. The more honour,
perhaps, to the courage and devotion of the
missionaries and philanthropists who persist
in trying to reclaim the irreclaimable, and to
wash the blackamoor white, and to take away
the spots from the leopard. Brave hearts!
May they go on trying, and never say
die!

There are two hundred thousand of these
coolies, it is said, in Cuba. The vast majority
of them are up the country, in the tobacco
and sugar plantations. They are the substitute
for slavery, as electro-ware is the
substitute for silver. They are as difficult to
keep in good order, and as generally unsatisfactory
as substitutes for anything are
generally found, on trial, to be. In the towns, they
are employed to a considerable extent as
mechanics and as cooks; in more than one
private house I have found Chinese footmen and
body-servants. They are said to be not unlike
cats in their characters: necessary, harmless—till
they are crossed-- sharp, quiet, noiseless,
contemplative, and very deceitful. There is a kind
of jail or market for coolies at a place called
El Corro, near Havana, and there they are sold
—I mean, there " contracts" can be made with
their " trustees" for their labour for a stated
term. At El Corro you may see them in their
native dress, and with their crowns shaven, all
but a tuft on the top—the stump of their
departed tails. A coolie may be purchased,
or " contracted " for, at a price varying
between three and four hundred dollars. You
are bound to pay the Chinaman you have
bought, four dollars per month, and to give him
his victuals and two suits of clothes per year.
For this he is bound to you for eight years.
The contract is put in writing before a juez de
paz, and two copies are made, one in Chinese
aud the other in Spanish, to be kept respectively
by the seller and the sold. The strongest
guarantee for the Chinaman receiving decent treatment
at the hands of his master is the almost
certainty of the former's committing suicide if