CHAPTER XIOUR PORTO RICO

Advertising a typical Dominican theatrical performance

A tree to which Columbus tied one of his ships, now on the wharf of Santo Domingo City

The tomb of Columbus in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo City

It is naturally irksome to a man who has always considered a revolver as a sign of caste, an adornment similar to a diamond ring or a gold-headed cane, to be forced to dispense with this portion of his attire. But not much can be said for the plaintiff in this case. There is more reason for sympathy with the countrymen who cannot even have a shotgun to kill the crows, woodpeckers, guinea-fowls, and parrots that destroy his crops. The man, too, is entitled to a hearing who has hundreds of laborers under his command in the wilder sections of the country, or who lives on the edge of the bandit zone, yet who can have nothing better than a machete with which to protect himself or his family. Our experience of the close resemblance betweengavillerosand respectable citizens, however, has sadly shattered our confidence, and it is difficult even for native officials whose duties carry them about the country to get permission to dress themselves up in firearms.

I have already spoken of the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the Dominicans on the subject of immigration. Their complaints on this score have become less acute since the military government promulgated the recent decree of registration and proof of self-support for alien laborers. There is still some grumbling, however. Native law forbids the bringing in of negro or Oriental workmen “except in cases of emergency.” The Americans, they assert, have permitted too many blacks from the neighboring islands to take employment in the great cane-fields of the South. Yet surely the harvesting of sugar is an “emergency” to the unsweetened world of to-day. Also, the American steamship line that monopolizes the carrying of goods to and from Santo Domingo brings stevedores from Turk’s Island and other points to work the cargoes, dropping them again at their homes, and the Dominicans complain that this lowers their standard of living. The fact is that the native laborers are not merely indolent; they are distressingly independent. About Thursday a bunch of them get together and say, “We have enough to live on until Tuesday. Why should we work?” So off goes the bunch on a dance-fiesta-cockfight spree and the canes wither in the field or cargoes lie untouched in the hold or on the dock. The workmen of the South, in particular, have the reputation of being the best time-killers in the world. The great sugar centrals of that region could not exist without the privilege of bringing in Haitian or British West Indian laborers.

Abhorring steady labor as he does, the Dominican has been quick to catch the drift of modern trade unionism in demanding exorbitant wages for indifferent work. At the recent labor conference in Washington Santo Domingo was represented by the mulatto son of a German,formerly governor of Puerto Plata, and a man who could not but have chuckled at his own humor in addressing the conference as “my fellow workmen.” Denied the privilege of holding office in the old style under American rule, these professional politicians are attempting to get a strangle-hold on the public purse by forming labor unions and appealing to the American Federation of Labor to bring its powerful influence to bear on the military government. The parade of a score ofgremiosduring our stay in the Dominican capital, nearly all of them formed within six months, shows what success is attending their efforts. The labor dictator of America seems to have fallen into the trap. He requests that the laborers of Santo Domingo be given “full liberty of action,” which sounds to those of us who have been there like permission to take a gun and turn bandit. Measured in dollars and cents the wages of the Dominican laborer are not high; balanced against the work he actually accomplishes they show him rather the exploiter than the victim. No one on earth, least of all the occupation, is hindering him from doing a good day’s work and getting reasonably well paid for it—except his own indolence, which in the end is apt to leave him swamped beneath foreign immigration in spite of any political manipulations.

Among those I talked with about their country’s “wrongs” was Deciderio Arias, the former war minister who added the last straw to American patience. He runs a pathetic little cigar factory in Santiago now, sleeping on a cot in one corner of it, and professes, I hesitate to report, a great friendship for “Big George.” A proud, rather ignorant mulatto, with perhaps a touch of Indian blood, a commanding manner still despite his reverses and the high degree of outward courtesy of all his people, he is, or pretends to be, fairly well satisfied with American occupation. All he wanted, he asserts, was internal peace for his beloved native land, and the marines have brought that, or nearly so. But he regrets that the Americans do not study the customs and “psychology” of the Dominican people, rather than jumping to the conclusion that what is good for themselves is unquestionably good for all other races.

Then there was Santo Domingo’s chief novelist and literary light, the pride of La Vega. He is perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the occupation in the country. “Cuba and Porto Rico have always been colonies,” he frothed, “and are used to having a rule of force thrust upon them. But Santo Domingo won her own independence single-handedand what we want, what we must have, isLIBERTY!” He did not add that the meaning of the word in this particular case was the right of continual revolution, but it was easy to supply that footnote for him. His wrath was scornful toward those of his fellow-countrymen who had “debased themselves” to accept office under the occupation, and he asserted that all who had done so were “the dregs of our national life.” The novelist’s testimony was somewhat discounted, however, by “Mac’s” characterization of him as a “one-cylinder crook,” who had been removed from public office for selling cancelled revenue stamps.

The parish priest of Seibo was far more favorable to the occupation. A native Dominican, without a hint of the asceticism of the French priests in Haiti, with a generous waist-line and the face of one who enjoys to the full all the good things of life, he had the ripe judgment of a man of the world, rather than the view-point of the cloister. All intellectual Dominicans, he explained, are ashamed that it was necessary, yet they know it is for their own good, that the Americans have “annexed” the country. The lesson has been hard to bear, but it was unavoidable, and now they have learned it so well that they “will never do it again”—it sounded like the cry of a bad boy under the paternal strap—if only we will let them govern themselves and still hold a menacing hand over them. It is the old Latin-American cry for protection without responsibility. Every Dominican would bless the United States if the marines were withdrawn and an advisory governor left. They would never again steal public office or government funds. They have been taught that continual revolutions are not a mere pastime, but a crime. TheintellectualAmericans of the occupation had done much good, he asserted, but their works had been largely offset by those of the other class. For all the violence he had reported, he seemed to have no hard feelings against us, but he felt that the time had come for us to go away. He “had heard it said” that thegavilleroswould return to theircanucosand settle down again as soon as the Americans leave. Many of them were simple rascals who had no sense of patriotism whatever, but only a desire to live by robbery and plunder. They were as apt to kill their own countrymen as Americans, rather more so, in fact, for the latter went armed and the Dominicans could not. Yet many of them had been driven to the hills by force of circumstances—by threats from the real bandits, by the marines mistaking an innocent family forgavillerosympathizers, or a man was falsely given a bad name and dared not come in and givehimself up, for fear of suffering the fate of Vicentico. Once these unwilling outlaws abandoned the fight the rest would have no choice but to disband.

It is difficult to admit, however, that Santo Domingo is now ready to govern itself, not because there are no educated and honest men in the country, but because these cannot get into power. Force rules; just elections are impossible. As in all Latin-America, with few exceptions, parties depend upon and take the name of their leader. Principles do not interest the rank and file in the least. In the old days the president always appointed a military man as provincial leader, that his “party” might not assert any signs of independence. Every district had its little localcacique, or tribal chief. Elections were two-day affairs. Woolly countrymen were brought in from the hills and voted at once. Thecaciquegot them shaved and voted them again; got them a hair-cut and voted them again; gave them a new shirt and voted them again. On the second day a half-dozen more disguises preceded their repeated visits to the polls. It is hard to believe that a bare four years of occupation have completely cured the Dominicans of such habits. The Americans, in fact, have never yet attempted to hold an election, hence there has been no new ideal held up to them in this matter. Under the old régime judges divided fines among themselves, and it cost much effort to get them to give up this privilege. Now they are apt to give ludicrously light fines, because it all goes to the internal revenue, in which they are not personally interested. Like a wayward boy who was never taught to govern himself, but was merely exploited by a heartless stepfather, from whom he finally ran away, Santo Domingo has no real conception of how to conduct itself in political matters, and up to the present occupation no one has ever attempted to teach it what it never learned from Spain or experience.

Some Dominicans would be satisfied with an American protectorate, provided they could have their own congress and a certain show of autonomy. Many thoughtful citizens want us to remain until a new generation has been trained to administer their affairs. So far little such training has been done, and it will take a long time to break them of their “Spig” habits. Cuba and Porto Rico have always been used to obeying the law, yet they have scarcely yet approached proper self-government. Santo Domingo has always run more or less wild; she needs a complete new standard of honor and morals. Among other things this will require at least twenty-five years of good elementary schooling. Nor should it be a hesitant, over-kindly schooling. Thetextbooks adopted should contain such pertinent queries as: “What are the chief faults of Dominicans (of Latin-Americans in general) which it is necessary to correct before they can take their proper place in the modern world? Answer: We must get rid ofCaudillismo, of personal instead of political parties”—and so on, with what may seem offensive frankness. Not only should Americans remain long enough in Santo Domingo to train a new generation, but we should tell them at once that such is our firm intention. The rumor that our troops are about to be withdrawn is always going around the country, leaving no one a certain peg on which to hang his hat. Remember how we hate the uncertainty of a presidential year. There should be a proclamation by our own federal government to the effect that we are going to remain for many years—I should say fifty, until all the present generation has disappeared—and that there is no use kicking meanwhile against the inevitable. Instead of that the present governor tells them that he will do all in his power to get them a civil government soon and to have the troops withdrawn, remaining perhaps as a civil governor. I do not believe they are ready for any such move, certainly not to handle their own finances, which is what they wish above all to do. Bit by bit they should be initiated into the mysteries of real self-government, but we should avoid the error we made in Cuba, and to some extent in Porto Rico, of graduating them before they have finished the grammar grades. If the unborn generation can be reared without political pollution from the living, there is promise even in such a race as the Dominican. However, have you ever set out on a journey astride a mongrel native horse and expected him to keep up with a thoroughbred?

The military occupation has made mistakes; all military governments do. But they are by no means so many nor so serious as those the Dominicans made themselves. There have been cases of arbitrariness, snap judgments, and injustice, but on the whole American rule is just, justifiable, and well done. Some of the trouble comes from the fact that navy youths of no experience are given importantsecretaríasthat require men of exceedingly mature judgment—though, to be sure, the governing of Santo Domingo, with its bare 750,000 inhabitants, is little more than a mayor’s job, except in extent of territory. A second drawback is that the most important posts are in the hands of men who know not a word of Spanish and must do all their work through interpreters, usually of the politician stripe, with results easily imagined.There is no reason whatever why graduates of Annapolis or West Point should not know what has become so important a language to their calling. Did anyone ever hear of a German professional officer who did not speak at least English and French fluently? Some of the time that is now given to “social functions” and the learning of afternoon-tea manners could easily be sacrificed to our new requirements. Lastly, there should be more knowledge and interest in our scattered wards among our higher officials at home. It is not particularly helpful to a naval officer suddenly appointed governor of such a place as Santo Domingo to have the secretary who should outline his policy turn from the map on which he has just looked up that unknown spot and make some such reply as, “Orders? Don’t bother me with details. I have more important matters requiring my attention. Go down there and sit on the lid.”

As an example of the improvements already accomplished by the occupation there is the matter of marriage. Formerly it was almost impossible for the mass of the people to form legal unions; the cost was too great and the requirements of birth certificates and other formalities insurmountable. As a result, marriage had come to be looked upon as a superfluous ceremony. This condition, more or less universal throughout the West Indies, is a deliberate legacy of olden times. The exploiters of the islands, particularly the Spaniards, abetted by the church, whose prosperity depended on their prosperity, purposely made marriage difficult among the laboring classes. A married woman and her children could demand support from her husband; a mere consort added to the available labor supply, because she was obliged to earn her livelihood in the fields and to send her children there early in life. Though there were men who treated their irregular families as legal dependents before the Americans came, illegitimate children were frequently abandoned, mistreated, or exploited to a degree that drove many of them to turn bandit. At best they suffered for want of a firm fatherly hand in their early years. The occupation attacked this problem by forcing men to pay for the support and schooling of their “outside” children. As little stigma attaches to this social misbehavior in Santo Domingo, there was seldom any difficulty in establishing the parentage. It was usually common knowledge. Even the priests have families in the majority of cases, many of them frankly acknowledging their sons and daughters. There are men in Santo Domingo, some of them veritable pillars of society, who suddenly saw their burdens increased from two or three children to twenty-fiveunder the new law. Marriages are now free, and are public ceremonies. They almost always take place at night, and crowds gather outside the wide-open, lighted house. Members of the family come out and talk with friends in the throng now and then but do not invite them inside. About the parlor table sit the bride and groom, the notary and the priest, surrounded by the standing relatives and intimateamigosandcompadres. There is much signing of documents and ledgers, each followed by a sort of rapturous sigh from the curious throng in the street, which under no circumstances short of a downpour gives any signs of breaking up until the new couple has retired from the scene. Most dances, fiestas, and family celebrations are like that in Santo Domingo, where the principal room always faces the street and the heat makes closed doors and windows worse than superfluous. Sometimes these open, chair-forested parlors are on a level with the sidewalk, sometimes several feet below it, but it is impossible to avoid a peep inside, even if one does not join the crowd. Besides, there is nothing secretive about such Dominican festivities; the bride who did not see a throng gathered before her door on her wedding night would probably weep her eyes out before morning.

When the Americans arrived there were only 18,000 pupils nominally attending the schools of Santo Domingo. There were no rural schools whatever. Many “teachers” never taught at all, but were merely political henchmen who drew salaries, some of them wholly illiterate. Some of them farmed their “pupils” out or worked them in their own fields. Superintendents and inspectors rarely did either, and kept no records whatever. Listen to a passage from a novel by a sworn enemy of the occupation:

The average Dominican woman frequented—the word is well chosen—a school of first letters sustained and directed by a priest, where she learned to read and write after a fashion, the barest rudiments of arithmetic and geography, and a world of prayers which the good priest made special effort to teach her. She had the catechism at her fingers’ ends, but except for the forms of devotion she was a complete ignoramus who took seriously any nonsense told her by those who happened, falsely or otherwise, to have her confidence.

There was not even a basis on which to build an educational system. Those charged with the task had to begin from the ground up. The peculiar status of Santo Domingo gives it an American Minister of Public Instruction and a native superintendent, the reverse of the case in Haiti. Both are earnest men, but pedagogy is not on the curriculum at Annapolis. No attempt has been made to Americanize the schools,as in Porto Rico and the Philippines, which is proper enough politically but questionable educationally. Every man has been made personally responsible for the men under him, clear down through the system. The occupation now has 100,000 pupils in the schools, with as many still unprovided for; but many of the former attend only half time for lack of accommodations. Dominican illiteracy still exceeds ninety per cent., and information passes chiefly by word of mouth, with consequent garbling. An attempt is being made to have the university in the capital teach only “practical” subjects, banishing the lofty culture with which the Latin-American loves to flirt. One gets the impression, however, that there is more attention and expense bestowed upon the elaborate educational pamphlets that pour in a constant stream from the government presses than on the adobe school houses and the barefoot urchins who attend them.

The Dominican of the masses is kindly, hospitable, long-suffering, and hopeful; in spite of having been exploited and mistreated for centuries, despite his tendency to settle things by force of arms and his low value on human life, he is still simple and good-hearted underneath. Even in the days of revolution lone Americans went in safety where a company of marines now moves with caution. The mothers of American girls married to officers of the occupation would be horrified to know that their daughters use murderers from the Guardia prisons as cooks and servants, yet such arrangements scarcely attract a passing comment among the Americans in Santo Domingo. Like all Latin-Americans, thedominicanohas no compassion, either for animals or his fellow-men. Brave enough in physical combat, he has little moral courage—I have already mentioned the inability of native officials to discipline their own people. Worst of all, he has no idea how to curb his politicians. The best families emigrated to Cuba during the twenty-two years of Haitian rule, and the latter closed the university and many of the schools as superfluous luxuries, which may be among the reasons why the “higher” classes do not measure up correspondingly in character with the masses. A rise in the social scale seems frequently to bring a drop in moral standards. As an example: The son of a shoemaker worked his way through school with truly American spirit; he studied medicine in Paris, learned English and French, is a voracious reader of all the literature of his profession in several languages. Yet when a poor countryman with a broken skull was brought in to him by a Guardia detachment, he declined to attendhim, after beginning the operation, because no one could assure him his $500 fee.

The Dominicans have few strictly native customs, their chief characteristic being their fondness for revolutions. They are gay, vivacious, and frivolous, fond of music and dancing, and find a great deal of amusement in the most trivial pastimes. Bull-fights have long since disappeared, but cock-fighting is the universal male sport, and on Sundays and feast days the cockpit is the center of attraction. Not a city or village is without itsgallera; in the country districts there is sure to be one within easy distance of every collection of thatched huts. On any holiday the traveler along the principal roads and highways is certain to meet a cavalcade of horsemen, each carefully carrying in a sack what the initiated know to be a prize rooster.

The chiefgalleraof Santo Domingo City was just back of our lodging. On Sunday we were awakened at dawn by its uproar, which varied in volume but never once ceased entirely until sunset. In the afternoon I wandered into the enclosure; paid an admission fee of twenty-five cents, and, climbing the tank-like outer wall, crowded into a place up near the round sheet-iron roof. The sport is legalized and a part of the gate-money goes to the municipality, netting some $1,500 a year. This is a mere bagatelle, however, compared to the sums that change hands among the spectators during a single day’s sport. Like most Spanish games, betting is the chief raison d’être of the cock-fight. The constant, deafening hubbub recalled the curb market of New York, as well as the ball games of Havana. Before each separate contest there were long waits while the shrieking spectators placed their wagers on the two haughty, gorgeous birds tenderly held by their owners or hired seconds.

It came as a surprise to find what class of men attend these contests in the capital. The circle of faces rising eight tiers high above the earth-floored pit were in many cases wholly free from negro strain; the great majority of the audience was not merely well-dressed, they showed considerable evidence of moderate affluence. Wealthy merchants and men high in local affairs, two or three ex-ministers, were pointed out to me as owners of one or several contending cocks. “Chickens” would be a more exact term, for the fighters, unlike the spectators, were not confined to one sex. Thetoilettesof the birds were fantastic in the extreme—each had been clipped, picked, or otherwisedenuded of its feathers on various parts of the body, particularly the thighs and neck, according to the whim or expert opinion of its trainer, and the appearance of its bare skin demonstrated that it was indeed in the “pink” of condition. An invariable formality preceded each contest. On a square board hanging stiffly on poles from the roof was placed a pair of scales in which the two opponents were weighed in their sacks, custom requiring that they balance one another to the fraction of an ounce. Then, when a lull in the betting showed that the spectators had decided their odds, the owner or his agent filled his mouth with rum and water and spurted it in a fine spray over the bird from haughty head to bare legs, and the fight was on.

The first battle after my arrival was between a black hen and a red India rooster. From the moment of release they went straight at it, like professional boxers. Now and then they clinched, but as there was no referee to separate them they eventually broke away themselves. Then the rooster took to running round and round the ring, the hen after him, which a “fan” beside me called clever strategy. During the early part of the fight the favorite changed with every peck, or slash of the spurs. Shouts loud as those at a Thanksgiving football game seemed to set the tin roof above us to vibrating. The shrieks of the bettors were emphasized by waving hands, by jumping up and down, by shaking money in one another’s faces and placing wagers at a distance by lightning-quick, cabalistic gestures. Those who hazarded a mere ten dollars a “throw” were the most insignificant of “pikers”; on every side flashed hundred-dollar bills, sometimes two or three of them in the same hand. Screams of ecstasy greeted each clever spur-stroke, awakening a loathsome disgust for one’s fellow-men. I found myself wondering how many of these shriekingfanáticoshad a tenth as much nerve as their gamey chickens. Certainly none of them would have endured so much punishment without crying quits. Gradually the bets dropped from even to ten to one. The rooster was getting the worst of it. He had gone stone blind, his head was a mass of blood, he was so groggy on his feet that he fell dizzily on his side now and then, only to struggle up again and fight on, pecking the air at random while his opponent continued a grueling punishment. The owner on the side lines kept shouting frantic advice to him,—“Anda, cobarde!Pica, gallo!” A lucky peck or spur-thrust sometimes suddenly gives the battle even to a blind cock, hence there was still hope. Toward the end the rooster frequently lay down from sheer fatigue, his opponent respecting his fallen condition with knightly honor and never oncetouching him until he had wobbled to his feet again. The exhibition became monotonously disgusting, even some of the “fans” began to protest, and at length the owner stepped into the pit with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders and snatched up the rooster, rudely, in one hand, like some carrion crow. His bleeding head hung as if he were dead. Even when a gamecock wins, it cannot fight again for months; if it loses it means the garbage heap or at best some pauper’s pot. A man at the ringside pulled the natural spurs off the defeated bird for use on some other less well-armed fowl, losing bettors began to hunt up the winners and pay their debts, and another throng invaded the ring in preparation for the next disgusting contest.

Santo Domingo City, more often called “La Capital” within the country, is a prettier town than Santiago, and somewhat larger. It is less compact, has more trees and open spaces, and many curious old ruins,—palaces, gates, fortresses, and churches—so many old churches, in fact, that some of them are now used as theaters and government offices. Of the several ancient stone gateways remaining from its former city wall the most curious is the “Puerta de la Independencia,” opening on a pretty outer plaza—curious because the Dominicans pretend it is the gate through which the triumphant army entered after driving out the Haitians in 1844, though any street urchin knows the entry was really made by a less ornate gate nearer the sea. Then there is the aged tree down in the custom house compound on the banks of the Ozama river to which Columbus is said to have tied one of his ships. The cathedral on the central plaza is a picturesque pile of old stone, without tower or spire, and noteworthy for the elaborate tomb of the famous Genoese just inside its main portal. Without going into the vexed question of whether the bones it contains are really those of the great discoverer, except to say that Havana, Valladolid, Seville, and Santo Domingo City are all equally certain that they have the genuine remains, one can at least say that the tomb itself is worth visiting. Indeed, though a trifle ornate for American tastes, it is astonishingly artistic to the traveler long familiar with the almost universally ludicrous “art” of Latin-American churches. With its splendid bronze reliefs, its excellent small figures in marble, and its inspiring general form, it might almost rank as the gem of ecclesiastical architecture south of the Rio Grande.

Once in the cathedral there are several other things worth a glance before leaving, though its tiny windows give the interior an eternaltwilight. Two or three paintings by Velasquez and Murillo have a genuine value; a picture brought over by Columbus can be seen only by means of the sexton’s key; a cross which the discoverer of America is said to have set up nearby is protected by glass doors let into the wall because the faithful and the curious were given to chipping off pieces as sacred relics or souvenirs. The mahogany choir-stalls, the pulpits, and the altars are all of rich-red old woodwork. There is an excellent tomb of the archbishop who was once president. Indeed, it does not seem necessary to be of Columbian stature to be able to sleep one’s last sleep beside the doughty old navigator. During our stay in the city the marble floor was opened a few feet from the historic tomb to receive the remains of a Syrian merchant, long resident in “La Capital” but deceased in New York, whose only claim to glory seemed to be a fortune easily won and wisely spent. The interior of the cathedral has been generously “restored” by daubing the walls with gleaming white. It was planned to whitewash the aged outer walls also, but the Pope vetoed the suggestion, for which the Dominicans seem to have a grievance against him.

The government palace, occupied now by Americans in navy and marine uniforms, is full of capacious leather-upholstered chairs, in striking contrast to the average uncomfortable Dominican seat. No wonder they fought one another to become president. Ostentation is more important than real use among the two score or more automobiles with wire wheels and luxurious tonneaux that hover about the central plaza, though there are good macadam roads for 16, 25, and 30 kilometers respectively in as many directions. The theaters are seldom occupied by actors in the flesh, though now and then there is a bit of opera. The only regular attractions are the movies, which begin at nine in theory, nearer ten in practice, and feature the same curly-haired heroes and vapid-faced heroines that nightly decorate the screens in the United States. Like all Latin-Americans, the people of “La Capital” are great lovers of noise. Despite American rule the crack-voiced church bells begin their constant din long before dawn. During the “flu” epidemic, with its endless succession of funerals, they thumped for nine mortal days without a pause, until the marine doctors protested that most of the victims were dying for lack of sleep. Automobiles scorn to use mufflers; carriages are constantly jangling their bells. Every boy in town is an expert whistler, and every passer-by will find some way of making a noise if he has to invent it. Thethrongs returning from the cinemas habitually make slumber impossible until after midnight. One comes to wonder if it is not this constant lack of sleep that makes the Dominicans so nervous, inattentive, and racially inefficient.

Small as it looks on the map it is not a simple matter to cover all Santo Domingo in a few weeks. Among the parts we missed were the southwestern provinces, including the town of Azua, seventy miles from the capital, founded in 1504 by Don Diego Velazquez, who later conquered and settled Cuba. Thereabouts once dwelt many illustrious sons of old Spain, among them Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, Pizarro, who subjugated Peru, and Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. A much shorter route from Port au Prince to the Dominican capital is that through this region, but it is chiefly by water. Lake Azua, partly in Haiti, is fifty-six feet above sea-level, and a paradise for duck-hunters. Lake Enriquillo, only five miles east of the other, and named for the last Indian chief who opposed the Spaniards, is a hundred feetbelowthe sea and more salty than the ocean itself. Nor should the traveler to whom time is unlimited fail to visit the high mountain ranges in the center of the country, with their breakneck trails and luxuriant vegetation.

One of the drawbacks of West Indian travel is the lack of shipping between the islands, particularly the larger ones. Only in the ports themselves can one get the slightest data on sailings, and often not even there. This is especially true of Santo Domingo, one of whose chief misfortunes is the American line that holds a virtual monopoly of its sea-going traffic. Not only are its freight and passenger rates exorbitant, its treatment of travelers and shippers worse than autocratic, and some of its steamers so decrepit that they take twenty-six days for the run down from New York, halting every few hours to pump out the vessel or patch something or other essential to her safety, but it keeps a throttle hold on poor Santo Domingo by more or less questionable means. Not long ago another line proposed to establish traffic between the island and New Orleans. One of its steamers put into a Dominican port, offering to take cargo at reasonable rates. Though the warehouses along the wharves were piled high with cacao, not a bag was turned over to the newcomer. Her captain button-holed a shipper and asked for an explanation.

“It’s like this,” whispered the latter, “we should like to give youour cargo, but if we do, the other line will leave our in-coming goods, on which we are absolutely dependent, lying on the dock in New York until they rot.”

The captain visited several other ports of the republic, with the same result, and the proposed line to New Orleans died for lack of nourishment. Disgruntled natives assert that the monopoly keeps its hold because it has a large fund with which to starve out competitors, and because its president is a member of our Shipping Board. The Dominicans, however, are losing patience, and there are signs that the freight that should go in American bottoms will gradually go to British, Dutch, and later to German steamers.

We were spared all this through the kindness of the military governor, who sent us to La Romana on a submarine chaser. Lest some reader be subject to seasickness by suggestion, I shall not say a word about the ability of these otherwise staunch little craft to cut incredible acrobatic capers on a barely rippling sea. The fact that we noted the gaunt old American battleshipMemphisstill sitting bolt upright on the rocks beside the seaside promenade of the capital just where a wave tossed her in September, 1916, the dangerous bottle entrance to the harbor of San Pedro de Macoris, with its wrecked schooner, and the water that spouted a hundred feet into the air through the coral holes along the low rocky coast and hung like mist for minutes before it fell, must be accepted as proof that we are experienced sailors. At length appeared the red roofs of La Romana, with its narrow river harbor, similar to that of the capital, and the Santo Domingo we knew was forever left behind.

Though it is in Dominican territory, La Romana is virtually American, a vast estate belonging to a great sugar company of Porto Rico. Thanks largely to it, sugar is the chief product of Santo Domingo. Here again was one of the hugecentralswith which we had grown so familiar in Cuba, with its big-business atmosphere, its long rows of excellent dwellings built of light coral rock along the edge of the jagged coast, its own stores, clubs, movies, and its many miles of standard-gauge railroad. We rode about this all the next morning, past immense stretches of cane, most of it recently cut, through bateys of white wooden huts raised on stilts, sidetracked now and again by long trains of cane, hungry bees hovering about them, and finally out upon great tracts where the company is pushing back the forests and the bandits to make way for increased sugar production. La Romana embraces a quarter million acres, of which only 16,000 are under cane, immenseas the fields already look. Three fourths of the estate is estimated good cane land, and the foothills make excellent pasture as fast as they are cleared. The felling of these great forests, with what would seem to the uninformed a wanton waste of lumber, has already altered the rainfall of the region. Formerly the rains were regular; this year not a drop fell in January, yet during the forty-eight hours of our visit in early February, the gauges registered more than five inches. The country women were everywhere paddling about under strips ofyaguain lieu of umbrellas.

The company employs from 7500 to 9000 men, of whom a bare hundred are Americans, most of them dwelling in the great centralbatey. The rest are chiefly Haitians and Porto Ricans, with a large sprinkling of negroes from all the other West Indian islands. English, Porto Rican, and Dominican schools are maintained, the teachers of the two former being paid out of company funds. There are very few Dominican employees, the natives, though good ax-men, being usually “too Castilian to work for a living.” Wages range from an average of $1.20 a day for cane-cutters to $4 for mechanics, with twelve-hour shifts and a twenty per cent. bonus for all. The contrast between this productive region and the great virgin wilderness of most of Santo Domingo gave serious meaning to the parting words of the company punster, “What the Dominicans need most is to stop raising Cain and go to raising cane.”

We left La Romana and Santo Domingo on one of the two cane boats that ply nightly between this dependency and the mother country. She was the flat-bottomed steamerGlencadamfrom the Great Lakes, flying the British flag and captained by a quaint old Scotchman whose cabin far forward contained almost transatlantic accommodations. Once more I draw the curtain, however, on the merely personal matters of pitch and roll, greatly abetted in this case by the recent rains, which had made it impossible to gather more than half a cargo. The very canes themselves were showing a tendency to waltz before we had passed the mouth of the river and turned our nose toward Porto Rico, already lying cloud-like and phantasmal on the eastern horizon.

CHAPTER XIOUR PORTO RICO

“When the queen asked for a description of the island,” says an old chronicle, “Columbus crumpled up a sheet of paper and, tossing it upon the table, cried, ‘It looks just like that, your Majesty!’”

If we are to believe more modern documents, the intrepid Genoese made that his stock illustration for most of the islands he discovered. Even the firm head of Isabela must have wobbled under its crown as one after another of the misnamed “West Indies” were pictured to her in the same concise fashion, and brushed off into the regal wastebasket. Fortunately, paper was cheaper in those days. Or was it? Perhaps it was the wrath born of seeing her last precious sheet turned into an island that soured the queen’s gratitude, and brought the doughty discoverer to dungeons and disgrace.

Questions of wanton waste aside, there could be no more exact description of Porto Rico. The ancient jest about quadrupling the area of a land by flattening it out all but loses its facetiousness when applied to our main West Indian colony. Barely a hundred miles long and forty wide, a celestial rolling-pin would give old Borinquen almost the vast extent of Santo Domingo. Its unbrokenly mountainous character makes any detailed description of its scenic beauties a waste of effort; it could be little more than a constant series of exclamations of delight.

For all its ruggedness, it is as easy to get about the island as it is difficult to cover the larger one to the westward. There is not a spot that cannot be reached from any other point between sunrise and sunset. A railroad encircles the western two thirds of the island, with trains by night as well as by day. When the Americans came, they found a splendidly engineered military road from coast to coast, with branches in several directions. If this sounds strange of a Spanish country, it must be accounted for not by civic pride or necessity, but in the vain hope of defending the island from armed invasion. To-day there are hundreds of miles of excellent highway covering Porto Rico with a network of quick transit that reaches all but the highest peaks of its central range. It is doubtful whether any state of our union can rival this detached bit of American territory in excellence and extent of roads, certainly not in the scenic splendor that so generally flanks them.

Ponce de Leon’s palace now flies the Stars and Stripes

Thousands of women work in the fields in Porto Rico

Air-plants grow even on the telegraph wires in Ponce

A hat seller of Cabo Rojo

Automobiles flash constantly along these labyrinthiancarreteras, many of them bearing the licenses of “the Mainland.” If the visitor has neglected to include his own car among his baggage and trembles at the thought of the truly American bill that awaits the end of a private journey, there are always theguaguas, pronounced “wawas” by all but those who take Spanish letters at full English value. Scarcely a road of Borinquen lacks one or two of the public auto-buses each day in either direction, carrying the mails and such travelers as deign to mix with the rank and file of their fellow-citizens of Spanish ancestry. My tastes no doubt are plebeian, but I for one gladly pass up the haughty private conveyance for these rumbling plow-horses of the gasolene world. They have all the charm of the old stage-coaches that prance through the pages of Dickens, except for the change of horses. In them one may strike up conversation with any of the varied types of rural Porto Rico, and the halt at each post-office brings little episodes that the scurrying private tourist never glimpses.

“We divide the people of Porto Rico into four categories for purposes of identification,” said the American chief of the Insular Police, “according to the shape of their feet. The minority, mostly town-dwellers, wear shoes. Of the great mass of countrymen, those with broad, flat feet, live in the cane-lands around the coast. The coffee men have over-developed big toes, because they use them in climbing the steep hillsides from bush to bush. In the tobacco districts, where the planting is done with the feet, they are short and stubby. It beats the Bertillon system all hollow.”

The man bent on seeing the varying phases of Porto Rican life could not do better than adopt the chief’s broad divisions of the population; for our over-crowded little Caribbean isle is a complex community, as complex in its way as its great stepmother-land, and one that defies the pick-things-up-as-you-go method. Small as it is, it contains a diversity of types that emphasizes the influence of occupation, immediate environment, even scenery, on the human family.

San Juan, the capital—to give the shod minority the precedence—is compacted together on a small island of the north coast, attached to the rest of the country only by a broad macadam highway along whichstream countless automobiles, and strictly modern street-cars and their rival auto-buses in constant five-cent procession. It was a century old when the Dutch colonized New Amsterdam. Small wonder that it looks upon its scurrying fellow-citizens from “los Estados” as parvenus. Palaces and fortifications that antedate the building of theMayflowerstill tower above the compact, cream-colored mass, most of them now housing high officials from the North. Casa Blanca, built for Ponce de Leon—the younger, it is true—now resounds to the footsteps of the American colonel commanding the Porto Rican regiment of our regular army. The governor’s palace, almost as aged, has an underground passage that carried many a mysterious personage to and from the outer sea-wall in the old Spanish days, and through which more than one American governor is said to have regained his quarters at hours and under conditions which caused him to mumble blessings on Castilian foresight, though it is hard to give credence to this latter tradition, for how could he escape the all-seeing American chief of police who occupies the lower story? The Stars and Stripes still seem a bit incongruous above the inevitable Morro Castle, while the tennis-court in its moat and the golf-links across its grassy parade-ground have almost a suggestion of the sacrilegious. Of the cathedral with its green plaster covering there is little to be said, except that the solemn Spanish dedication over the bones of Ponce de Leon loses something of its solemnity in being signed by Archbishop Monseñor Bill Jones. The mighty sea-wall that holds the sometimes raging Atlantic at bay, and massive San Cristobal fortress at the neck of the town are worth coming far to see, but they have that in common with many a Spanish-American monument.

For after all, San Juan is still a son of Spain, despite the patently American federal building that contains its post-office and custom-house. Its architecture is of the bare, street-toeing façade, interior-patio variety, its sidewalks all but imaginary, its noise unceasing. Beautiful as it looks from across the bay, heaped up on its nose of land, it has little of the pleasant spaciousness of younger cities, and withal no great amount of the Latin charm with which one imbues it from afar. Its Americanization consists chiefly of frequent “fuentes de soda” in place of its bygone cafés, and a certain reflection of New York ways in its larger stores, whose almost invariably male clerks sometimes know enough English to nod comprehendingly and bring an armful of shirts when one asks for trousers. Something more thanthat, of course; its dressier men have discarded their mustaches as a sign of their new citizenship, and many a passer-by who knows not a word of English has all the outward appearance of a continental American. Base-ball, too, has come to stay, though the counter influence may be detected in the custom of American schoolmarms of attending the bet-curdling horse races in the outskirts of the capital on Sunday afternoons.

The central plaza on a Sunday evening has a few notes of uniqueness to the sated Latin-American traveler. It is unusually small, a long, narrow rectangle with few trees or benches, cement paved from edge to edge, and burdened with the name of “Plaza Baldorioty.” The Porto Rican seems to like free play in his central squares; more than a few of them have been denuded of the royal palms of olden times, and are reduced to the bare hard level of a tennis-court. A few years ago a venturesome American Jew conceived the plan of providing concert-going San Juan with rocking-chairs in place of the uncomfortable ironsillasthat decorate every other Sunday-evening plaza south of the Rio Grande. Strangely enough, the innovation took. Now one must be an early arrival at the weeklyretretaif he would exchange his dime for even the last of the rockers that flank the Plaza Baldorioty four rows deep on each side. While the municipal band renders its classical program with a moderate degree of skill, all San Juan rocks in unison with the leader’s baton. All San Juan with the color-line drawn, that is; for whether it is true that the well-groomed insular police have secret orders to ask them to move on, or it is merely a time-honored custom, black citizens shun the central square on Sunday evenings, or at most hang about the outskirts. There is no division of sexes, however, another evidence perhaps of American influence. Señoritas sometimes good to look at in spite of their heavy coating of rice powder trip back and forth beside their visibly enamored swains as freely as if the Moorish customs of their neighboring cousins had long since been forgotten. For the time-honored promenade has not succumbed to the rocking-chair. One has only to turn his rented seat face down upon the pavement, like an excited crap-player, to assure his possession of it upon his return from the parading throng, whose shuffling feet and animated chatter drown out the music a few yards away, and no great harm done. In that slow-moving procession one may see the mayor and all the “quality” of San Juan, a generous sprinkling of Yankees, and scores of American soldiers who know barely aword of English, yet who have a racial politeness and a complete lack of rowdyism that is seldom attained by other wearers of our military uniform. Then suddenly one is aware of a tingling of the blood as theretretaends with a number that, far from the indifference or scorn it evokes in the rest of Latin America, brings all San Juan quickly to its feet, males uncovered or standing stiffly at salute—the Star-Spangled Banner.

From the sea-wall one may gaze westward to Cabras Island, with its leper prisoners, and beyond to Punta Salinas, “poking its rocky nose into the boiling surf.” Ferries ply frequently across the bay to pretty Cataño, but it is far more picturesque at a distance. From San Juan, too, the tumbled deep-green hills behind the little town have a Japanese-etching effect in the mists of the rainy season that is gradually lost as one approaches them, as surely as when the sun burns it away.

But there is more to modern San Juan than this old Spanish city huddled together on its nose of rock. It has grown in American fashion not only by spreading far beyond its original area, but by boldly embracing far-flung suburbs within the “city limits.” Puerta de Tierra, once nothing more than the “land gate” its name implies, is almost a city of itself, a pathetic town of countless shacks built of tin and drygoods boxes, spreading down across the railroad to the swampy edge of the bay, where anemic babies roll squalling and naked in the dirt, and long lines of hollow-eyed women file by an uninviting milk-shop, each holding forth a pitifully small tin can. It is far out across San Antonio Bridge, however, that the capital has seen most of its growth under American rule. More than half of its seventy thousand, which have raised it, perhaps, to second place among West Indian cities, dwell in capacious, well-shaded Miramar and Santurce. Time was when its people were content to make the upper story of the old town its “residential section,” but it is natural that the desire for open yards and back gardens should have come with American citizenship.

Ponce, on the south coast, gives the false impression of being a larger city than the capital, loosely strewn as it is over a dusty flat plain and overflowing in hovels of decreasing size into the low foot-hills behind. It is the most extensive town in Porto Rico, and, like many of those around the coast, lies a few miles back from the sea, for fear of piratesin the olden days, with a street-car service to its shipping suburb of Ponce-Playa. Air-plants festoon its telephone wires, and its mosquitos are so aggressive that to dine in its principal hotel is to wage a constant battle, while to disrobe and enter a bathroom is a perilous undertaking.

It was carnival time when we visited Ponce. By day there was little evidence of it, except for the urchins in colored rags who paraded the streets and the unusual throngs of gaily garbed citizens who crowded the plaza on Sunday afternoon. At night bedlam broke loose, though, to tell the truth, the uproar was chiefly caused by automobile-horns. The medieval gaieties of this season have sadly deteriorated under the staid American influence. What there is left of them takes place chiefly within the native clubs, each of which has its turn in gathering together the élite of the city and such strangers as can establish their ability to conduct themselves with Latin courtesy. We succeeded in imposing ourselves upon the Centro Español. But there were more spectators than spectacle in its flag and flower-festooned interior. Toward ten the throng had thickened to what seemed full capacity, but it was made up chiefly of staid dowagers and solemncaballeroswhose formal manners would have been equally in place at a funeral. Only a score of girls wore masks, and these confined their festive antics to pushing their way up and down the hall, squeaking in a silly falsetto at the more youthful oglers. Even confetti was strewn sparingly, evidently for lack of spirit of the occasion, for the mere fact that a small bag of it cost $1.50 seemed no drawback to those who would be revelers. At the unseemly hour of eleven the queen at length made her appearance, escorted to her throne by pages, knights and ladies-in-waiting, while courtiers flocked about her with insistent manners that could be called courteous only in Latin-American society. But her beauty was tempered by an expression that suggested bored annoyance, whether for the tightness of her stays or the necessity of avoiding lifelong disgrace by choosing one of these pressing suitors before a year had passed there was no polite means of learning. The most aggressive swain led her forth and the dancing began. It differed but slightly from a dance of “high society” in any other part of the world. I wandered into the “bar.” But alas! I had forgotten again that I was in my native land. There was something pathetically ludicrous in the sight of the score of thirsty Latin-Americans who gazed pensively at the candy, chewing-gum, and “soft drinks” that decorated what had once been so enticing a sideboard, for afterall they were not of a race that had abused the bottled good cheer that has vanished.

Mayagüez was more like the ghost of a city than a living town. Its ugly plaza was a glaring expanse of cracked and wrinkled cement across which wandered from time to time a ragged, hungry-looking bootblack or a disheveled old woman, dragging her faded calico train, and slapping the pavement in languid regularity with her loose slippers. On his cracked globe pedestal in the center of the square the statue of Columbus stood with raised hand and upturned gaze as if he were thanking heaven that he had not been injured in the catastrophe. Of the dozen sculptured women perched on the balustrade around the place several had lost their lamps entirely; the rest held them at tipsy angles. The massive concrete and mother-of-pearl benches were mostly broken in two or fallen from their supports. Workmen were demolishing the ruined cathedral at the end of the square, bringing down clouds of plaster and broken stone with every blow of their picks, and now and then a massive beam or heavy, iron-studded door that suggested the wisdom of seeing the sights elsewhere. House after house lay in tumbled heaps of débris as we strolled through the broad, right-angled streets, along which we met not hundreds, but a scattered half-dozen passers-by to the block. The majority of these were negroes. The wealthier whites largely abandoned the town after the disaster. Spaniards gathered together the remnants of their fortunes and returned to more solid-footed Spain; Porto Ricans began anew in other parts of the island. The sisters of St. Vincent de Paul have a bare two hundred pupils now where once they had two thousand. It was hard to believe that this was a city of teeming, over-crowded Porto Rico.

Eighty years ago earthquakes were so continuous in this western end of the island that for one notable six months the population ate its food raw; pots would not sit upon the stoves. But the new generation had all but forgotten that. Guide-books of recent date assert in all sincerity that “Porto Rico is as free from earthquakes as from venomous snakes.” Then suddenly on the morning of October 11, 1918, a mighty shake came without an instant’s warning. Within twenty seconds most of Mayagüez fell down. The sea receded for several miles, and swept back almost to the heart of the town, tossing before it cement walls, automobiles, huge iron blocks, débris, andmutilated bodies. Miraculous escapes are still local topics of conversation. A merchant was thrown a hundred yards—into a boat that set him down at length on his own door-step. A great tiled roof fell upon a gathering of nuns, and left one of them standing unscratched in what had been an opening for a water-pipe. Scientists, corroborated by a cable repair-ship, explain that the sea-floor broke in two some forty miles westward and dropped several hundred fathoms deeper. Lighter quakes have been frequent ever since; half a dozen of them were felt all over Porto Rico during our stay there. The inhabitants of all the western end are still nervous. More than one American teacher in that region has suddenly looked up to find herself in a deserted school-room, the pupils having jumped out the windows at the first suggestion of a tremor.

Mayagüez is slowly rebuilding; of reinforced concrete now, or at least of wood. Little damage was done on that October morning to wooden structures, which is one of the reasons that the crowded hovels along the sea front have none of the deserted air of the city proper. A still more potent reason is that this class of inhabitants had nowhere else to go. By Porto Rican law the entire beach of the island is government property, for sixty feet back of the water’s edge. As a consequence, what would in our own land be the choicest residential section is everywhere covered with squatters, who pay no rent, and patch their miserable little shelters together out of tin cans, old boxes, bits of driftwood, andyaguaor palm-leaves, the interior walls covered, if at all, with picked-up labels and illustrated newspapers.

One can climb quickly into the hills from Mayagüez, with a wonderful view of the bay, the half-ruined city, with its old gray-red tile roofs, rare now in Porto Rico, and seas of cane stretching from the coast to the foot-hills, which spring abruptly into mountains, little huts strewn everywhere over their crinkled and warty surface as far as the eye can see.

Its three principal cities by no means exhaust the list of important towns in Porto Rico. Indeed the number and the surprising size of them cannot but strike the traveler, the extent even of those in the interior astounding the recent visitor to Cuba. There is Arecibo, for instance, a baking-hot, dusty place on a knoll at the edge of the sea, with no real harbor, but a splendid beach—given over to naked urchins and foraging pigs—and a railroad station that avoids the town by amile or more, as if it were suffering from the plague. San Germán, founded by Diego Columbus in 1512, destroyed times without number by pirates, Indians, all the European rivals of Spain, and even by mosquitos, which forced its founders to rebuild in a new spot, has moved hither and yon about the southwestern corner of the island until it is a wonder its own inhabitants can find it by night. Or there is Cabo Rojo, where hats of more open weave than the Panama are made of thecogollapalm-leaf of the palmetto family.

Yauco, a bit farther east, is striking chiefly for the variegated haystack of poor man’s hovels resembling beehives, that are heaped up the steep hillside in its outskirt and seen from afar off in either direction. Guayama is proud, and justly so, of its bulking new church, which is so up-to-date that it is fitted with Pullman-car soap-spouts for the saving of holy water. Maunabo, among its cane-fields, lies out of reach of buccaneer cannon, hurricanes, and tidal waves, like so many of the “coast” towns of old Borinquen, and does its seaside business through a “Playa” of the same name. It still holds green the memory of the stern but playful young American school-master who first taught its present generation to salute the Stars and Stripes, but though it boasts a faultless cement building now in place of the hovel that posed asescuela públicain those pioneer days, it seems not to have learned the American doctrine of quick expansion as well as some of its fellows.

Beyond Maunabo the highway climbs through huts and rocks that look strangely alike as they lie tossed far up the spur of the central range, then past enormous granite boulders that suggest reclining elephants, and out upon an incredible expanse of cane, with pretty Yabucoa planted in its center and Porto Rico’s dependent islands of Vieques and Culebra breaking the endless vista of sea to the southward. Humacao and Naguabo have several corners worthy a painter’s sketchbook, and soon the coast-line swings us northward again to sugar-choked Fajardo, with its four belching smokestacks, and leaves us no choice but to cease our journeyings by land or return to San Juan. There we may dash across or around the bay to Bayamón, a “whale of a town and a bad one,” in the words of the police chief, but also the site of the “City of Puerto Rico” that afterward changed its name and location and became the present capital. Of the towns that dot the mountainous interior the traveler should not miss Caguas and Cayey, Coamo and Comerio, Barranquitas and Juana Diaz, Lares and Utuado, and a half-dozen others that are no mere villages, including Aibonito (Ai! Bonito!—Ah! Pretty!) set more than two thousandfeet aloft, and famed for itsfresas, which in Porto Rico means a fruit that grows on a thorny bush beside the little streams of high altitudes, that looks like a cross between a luscious strawberry and a mammoth raspberry and tastes like neither.

But it is high time now to descend to Coamo Springs for the one unfailingly hot bath in the West Indies—when one can induce the servants to produce the key to it.

Some eighty years ago a man was riding over the breakneck trail from Coamo to Ponce to pay a bill—there is a fishy smell to that last detail, but let it pass—when he lost his way and stumbled by accident upon a hot spring. Making inquiries, he found that the region belonged to a druggist in the southern metropolis and that his own broad acres bounded the property on the left. He called on the druggist and after the lengthy preliminaries incident to any Spanish-American deal, offered to sell his own land to the apothecary.

“It’s of no use to me,” he explained, “and as you have the adjoining land—and—and”

“Why,” cried the druggist, “my ownfincais not worth a peseta tome!Why on earth should I be buying yours also?”

“Well, then, I’ll buy yours offyou,” suggested the horseman; “there is no sense in having two owners to a tract that really belongs together. Let’s settle the matter and be done with it. I happen to have two thousand dollars with me. I was going to pay a debt with it”—the fishy smell was no olfactory illusion, you see—“but—”

The druggist jumped at the chance, the titles were transferred, and the horseman rode homeward—no doubt giving his creditor a wide berth. He built a shack beside the hot spring, carved out a bath in the rock, invited his friends, who also found the strange custom pleasant, and gradually there grew up around the place a hotel famous for its—gambling. Clients willingly slept in chairs by day, when rooms were full, if only they could lose their money by night. By the time the Americans came Coamo Springs was synonymous with the quick exchange of fortunes. A more modern hotel had been built, with a broad roofed stairway leading down to the baths, and rooms enough to ensure every gambler a morning siesta. Then one day—so the story goes, though I refuse to be hauled into court to vouch for it—an American governor who was particularly fond of the attraction of the place, betook too freely of the now forbidden nectars and ended by smashing up most of the furniture within reach, whereupon the proprietor sent him a bill for $1000 damages. Two days later the governorlearned officially, to his unbounded surprise, that gambling was going on at Coamo Springs! The place was at once raided, and to-day the most model of old ladies may visit it without the slightest risk of having her sensibilities so much as pin-pricked.

I came near forgetting entirely, however, what is perhaps the most typical town of Porto Rico. Aguadilla, nestling in the curve of a wide bay on the northwest coast, where the foot-hills come almost down to the sea, and with a pretty little isle in the hazy offing, has much the same proportion between its favored few and its poverty-stricken many as the island itself. A monument a mile from town commemorates the landing of Columbus in 1493 to obtain water, though Aguada, a bit farther south, also claims that honor. The distinctly Spanish church, too, contains beautiful hand-carved reproductions in wood of Murillo’s “Assumption” and “Immaculate Conception,” noteworthy as the only unquestionably artistic church decorations in Porto Rico. The merely human traveler, however, will find these things of scant interest compared to the vast honeycomb of hovels that make up all but the heart of Aguadilla.

The hills, as I have said, come close down to the sea here, leaving little room for the pauperous people of all Porto Rican suburbs. Hence those of Aguadilla have stacked their tiny shacks together in the narrow rocky canyons between the mountain-flanking railroad and the sea-level. So closely are these hundreds of human nests crowded that in many places even a thin man can pass between them only by advancing sidewise. Built of weather-blackened bits of boxes, most of them from “the States,” with their addresses and trademarks still upon them, and of every conceivable piece of rubbish that can deflect a ray of sunshine or the gaze of passers-by, they look far less like dwellings than abandoned kennels thrown into one great garbage-heap. Of furnishing they have almost none, not even a chair to sit on in many cases. The occupants squat upon the floor, or at best take turns in the “hammock,” a ragged gunnysack tied at both ends and stretched from corner to corner of the usually single room. A few have one or two soiled and crippled cots, but never the suggestion of amosquitero, though the mosquitos hold high revel even by day in this breathless amphitheater. For wash-tubs they use a strip ofyaguapinned together at one end with a sliver and set on the sloping ground beneath the hut to keep the water from running away at the other. The families are usually large, in spite of an appalling infant mortality,and half a dozen children without clothing enough between them to properly cover the smallest are almost certain to be squalling, quarreling, and rolling about the pieced-together floor or on the ground beneath it.

For the hovels are always precariously set up on pillars of broken stone under their four corners, and the earth under them is the family playground and washroom. There is no provision whatever for sewerage; water must be lugged up the steep hillside from the better part of the town below. Break-neck ladder-steps, slippery with mud and with a broken rung or two, connect ground and doorway. The poverty of Haiti, where at least there is spaciousness, seems slight indeed compared to this.

Yet this is no negro quarter. Many of the inhabitants are of pure Caucasian blood, and the majority of them have only a tinge of African color. Features and characteristics that go with diligence and energy, with success in life, are to be seen on every hand. Nor is it a community of alms-seekers. It toils more steadily than you or I to be self-supporting; the difficulty is to find something at which to toil. Scores of the residents own theirsolar, or patch of rock on which their hut stands; many own the hut itself. Others pay their monthly rental, though they live for days on a handful of plantains—pathetic rentals of from twenty to thirty cents a month for thesolarand as much for the hovel, many of which are owned by proud citizens down in the white-collar part of the town.

For all their abject poverty these hapless people are smiling and cheerful, sorry for their utter want, yet never ashamed of it, convinced that it is due to no fault of their own. That is a pleasing peculiarity of all the huddled masses of Porto Rico. They are quite ready to talk, too, on closely personal subjects that it is difficult to bring up in more urbane circles, and to discuss their condition in a quaintly impersonal manner, with never a hint of whining.

I talked with an old woman who was weaving hats. She lived alone, all her family having died, of under-nourishment, no doubt, though she called it something else. The hat she was at work upon would be sold to the wholesalers for thirty cents; it was almost the equal of the one I wore, which had cost five dollars,—and the material for two of them cost her twenty cents. She could barely make one a day, what with her cooking and housework. Cooking of what, for Heaven’s sake? Oh, yams and tubers, now and then a plantain from a kind friend she had. One really required very little for such labor. Shesmiled upon me as I descended her sagging ladder and wished me much prosperity.

A muscular fellow a bit farther on, white of skin as a Scandinavian, was “a peon by trade,” but there was seldom work to be had. He sold things in the streets. It was a lucky day when he made a profit of fifteen cents. His wife made hats, too. With three children there was no help for it, much as he would like to support his family unassisted. The house? No, it was not his—yet; though he owned thesolar. The house would cost $32; meanwhile he was paying thirty cents a month for it.

A frail little woman in the early thirties looked up from her lace-making as I paused in her doorway. In her lap was a small, round, hard cushion with scores of pins stuck in it, and a wooden bobbin at the end of each white thread. She clicked the bits of wood swiftly as she talked, like one who enjoyed conversation, but could not afford to lose time at it. Yes, she worked all day and usually well into the night—nodding at a wick in a little can of tallow. By doing that she could make a whole yard of lace, and get eighty cents for it. It took a spool and a third of thread—American thread,mira usted—at ten cents a spool. Fortunately, she was young and strong, though her eyes hurt sometimes, and people said this work was bad on the lungs. But she had her mother to support, who was too old to do much of anything—the toothless crone, grinning amiably, slouched forward out of the “next house,” which was really another room like the incredibly piece-meal shack in which I stood, though with a separate roof. The rent of the two was thirty cents; they were worth thirteen dollars—the lace-maker mentioned that enormous sum with a catch in her breath. Then she had a little girl. There had been four children, but three had died. Her husband was gone, too—Oh, yes, she had been really married. They had paid $3.75 for the ceremony. She had heard that the Protestants did it cheaper, but of course when one is born a Catholic.... Some women in the quarter were “only married by God,” but that was not their fault. She never had time to go to mass, but she had been to confession four times. There had been no charge for that. Her daughter—the frizzly-headed little tot of six or seven had come in munching a mashedboniatoin a tiny earthen bowl, with a broken spoon—went to school every day. She hoped for a great future for her. She had gone to school herself, but she “wasn’t given to learn.” She couldn’t get the child the food the teacher said was good for her. Even rice was sixteen cents apound, and those—pointing to three or four miserable roots in the burlap “hammock”—cost from one to four cents apiece now. And clothing! Would I just feel the miserable stuff her waist was made of—it was miserable indeed, though snowy white. Then she had to buy a board now and then for two or three cents to patch the house; the owner would never do it. Once she had tried working in a warehouse down by the wharf. The Spaniards said they paid a dollar a day for cleaning coffee—because the law would not let them pay less, or work women more than eight hours a day. Yet the cleanersmustdo two bags a day or they didn’t get the dollar, and no woman could do that if she worked ten, or even twelve, hours. Clever fellows, thosepeninsulares! The little basket of oranges in the doorway? Oh, she sold those to people in the gully, when any of them could buy. Some days she made nothing on them, at other times as much as four cents profit. But “that goes for my vice, for I smoke cigarettes,” she concluded, as if confessing to some great extravagance.

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