presume, is to drive about to the residences of
your friends and acquaintances, and strike
despair into their souls by flashing your liveries
and appointments in their eyes. You could
scarcely put your gondoliers into buckskins
and pickle-jar boots, although, upon my word,
I remarked, lately, at Venice, that the Count
of Chambord, otherwise the Duke of
Bordeaux, otherwise Henry the Fifth, King of France
and Navarre—who lives, when he is not at Froksdorff,                                              at one of the most beautiful palaces on the
Grand Canal, and keeps half a dozen gondolas for
his private recreation—has been absurd enough
to dress up his boatmen in tail coats, gold-laced
hats, plush breeches and gaiters. Truly, the
Bourbons have learnt nothing, and forgotten
nothing. Incongruity of incongruities! Imagine
Jeames de la Pluche on the Grand Canal.

As one could not drive down to Ascot in a
gondola, or take it to the Crystal Palace on a half-
crown day, or keep it waiting for an hour and a
half at the door of one's club—and as the linkman
at the Royal Italian Opera would.be slightly
astonished at having to proclaim that Mr.
Anonymous's gondola stopped the way, I must
abandon all hopes of possessing a marine Shillibeer
until I can afford to take a palace at Venice.

But, if my longings are not to be satisfied
in Europe, there is in the Spanish West
Indies a carriage to be longed for: ay, and the
longing may be gratified at a very moderate
expenditure. In the city of Havana, and in
Havana alone, is to be found this turn-out.
It is but a "one-hoss shay;" but it is a
chaise fit for princes and potentates to ride in.
It is the queerest trap into which mortal ever
mounted. It is unique and all but inimitable.
Those who have visited Cuba will understand
that I allude to the famous conveyance called                                                      THE THE VOLANTE.

The rooms looking on the street in Havana
are necessarily provided with windows, but
these casements are garnished with heavy ranges
of iron bars, behind which you sit and smoke,
or eat, or drink, or yawn, or twist your fan, or
transfix the male passers-by with dreamy, yet
deadly, glances, precisely as your habits, or
your sex, or the time of the day may prompt
you. Skinny hands are often thrust between
these bars; and voices cry to you in Creole
Spanish to bestow alms for the sake of the Virgin
and the saints. Sometimes rude boys make faces
at you through the grating, or rattle a bamboo
cane in discordant gamut over the bars, till you
grow irritable, and begin to fancy that Havana
is a zoological garden, in which the insiders and
outsiders have changed places; that you have
been shut up in the monkey-house; and that the
baboons are grimacing at you from the open.
I was sitting at the grated window of El Globo's
restaurant after breakfast, dallying with some
preserved cocoa-nut, a most succulent "goody,"
and which is not unlike one of the spun-glass
wigs they used to exhibit at the Soho Bazaar
dipped in glutinous syrup, when, across the
field of vision bounded by the window-pane,
there passed a negro, mounted on horseback.

The animal was caparisoned in blinkers, and a
collar, and many straps and bands, thickly
bedight with silver ornaments, which I thought
odd in the clothing of a saddle-horse. But it
might be un costumbre del païs, I reflected;
just such another custom as that of plaiting up
the horse's tail very tightly, adorning it with
ribbons, and tying the end to the saddle-bow.
An absurd custom, and a cruel custom; for
in the tropics the horse's tail was obviously
given him for the purpose of whisking away the
flies, which sorely torment him. The black
man bestriding this tail-tied horse grinned at
me as he rode by, touched his hat, and made a
gesture as though of inquiry. That, also, I
conjectured to be a Cuban custom. Those big
placable unreasoning babies, called negroes, are
always grinning and bowing, and endeavouring
to conciliate the white man, whom they respect
and fear, and love, too, after a fashion. This was
a stately black man—a fellow of many inches,
muscular, black as jet, and shiny. He wore a straw
hat with a bright ribbon, a jacket of many colours,
a scarlet vest, white small-clothes, very high jack-
boots—so at least they seemed to me—with long
silver spurs, and large gold rings in his ears.
He carried a short stocked whip, with a very
long lash of many knots, and he rode in a high
demi-peaked saddle, with Moorish stirrups,
profusely decorated, like the harness, with
silver. I could not quite make him out. The
Postilion of Longjumeau, a picador from the
bull-ring, Gambia in the "Slave" on horseback,
struggled for mastery in his guise. He moved
slowly across the window, and I saw him no
more. I forgot all about this splendid spectre
on horseback, and returned to my dalliance
with the preserved cocoa-nut. Time passed.
It might have been an hour, it might have been
a minute, it might have been a couple of seconds
—for the march of Time is only appreciable in
degree, and is dependent on circumstances—
when, looking up from the cocoa-nut, I saw the
plane of vision again darkened. Slowly, like the
stag in a shooting-gallery, there came bobbing
along a very small gig body, hung on very large C
springs, and surmounted by an enormous hood.
Stretched between the apron and the top of
this hood at an angle of forty-five degrees, was
a kind of awning or tent of some sable fabric.
Peeping between the hood and the awning,
I saw a double pair of white-trousered legs,
while at a considerable altitude above, two spirals
of smoke were projected into the air. "Surely," I
exclaimed, "they can never be so cruel as to make
their negro slaves draw carriages." I rose from
the table, and, standing close to the bars, gained
a view of the street pavement. But no toil-worn
negro was visible, and, stranger to relate, no
horse, only the gig body and a pair of wheels
big enough to turn a paper-mill, and a pair of
long timber shafts, and a great gulf between.
Mystery! Was that an automaton, or Hancock's
steam-coach come to life again? Had my field
of view been less confined, I might have
discovered that there was, indeed, a horse between
the shafts, but that he was a very long way off.