.152 THE VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA.
the perfumed incense of orange groves; and here a wonderful city ghttering beside a glassy sea, a city famous for its cigars, its fountains, its magnificent opera house and mosaic mirrored counting house, its narrow streets and broad shaded carriage-way and Isabel Segunde promenade, its grand plaza, cafes and brilliant gas lights, its moonlight music, and gay military officers, and dark-eyed senoritas, and its two- wheeled volantes — the hansom cab of London and the gondola of Venice — drawn by a small, scrawny horse, harnessed to the ends of two long poles ten feet and over from the vehicle. The tail of the ani- mal is braided so as to leave it at the mercy of tor- menting flies, and besides drawing the gig with its freight of fat Cubans or fair senoritas, the poor beast must carry a driver with large jingling spurs and heavy club. If more than one beast is attached to a volante, the horses are usually driven tandem.
To the the bishop's garden, the popular drive, most of our passengers went for the day — past villas and chateaus buried in blooming foliage, through avenues bordered by hedges of roses, and shaded by orange-trees bending beneath their golden fruit. At night we listened to the band playing in the plaza, and watched the half-veiled senoritas, and sombre looking men and smoking women and naked boys, moving noisily about beneath the shrubbery and under the glowing moon which, mirrored on the glassy water of the harbor, made it shine, like a sea of silver, Siempre fiel isla de Cuba; la'loya mas brilliante en la carona d' Espana — heaven be with thee, as thou in my youthful fancy appeared almost like heaven.
The passengers, baggage, mails, and freight of the George Law were here transferred to the steamer Georgia, and day and evening were consumed in the operation. At length, worn out by unaccustomed fatigue, tired even of a tropical paradise, we shoul- dered a quantity of cigars which we had purchased
