Here were immense Chinese vases full of fresh cut flowers, trailing boughs of the golden trumpet vine, huge bunches of the peacock acacia, and other specimens of brilliant tropical bloom, such as my eyes had never rested on before.
"Ah," said our hostess, "you see I always have cut flowers in my rooms, but you will never find them in the house of any Spaniard or Cuban. Even the negroes seem to object to them, and are apt to throw them away as soon as my back is turned. But what I want you to notice, whilst they are getting breakfast ready for us, are some mantis which we caught this morning in the garden;" and here the lady brought forward a box with a glass lid, containing apparently four or five beautiful green leaves, about the size and shape of a poplar leaf. But they were living insects, so cunningly formed by Nature that even the birds disdain to touch them, be they ever so hungry, fully believing them to be tasteless castaway foliage. The manti family is largely represented throughout the whole of the West Indies, from the sly gentleman who looks like a piece of broken brown stick, some four or five inches in length, to the pale green leaf we had just admired, and to yet another species which has all the appearance, and even the indentures and veining, of an autumn-tinted oak leaf, and which, moreover, the better to deceive its enemies, flutters to the ground exactly as if the wind had detached it from the bough of some tall tree.
Everywhere in this fine _hacienda_, all that wealth could procure to increase comfort had been introduced by a lavish and tasteful hand. The lofty bedrooms, I remember, were deliciously clean and airy, and the brass bedsteads--a real luxury in the tropics--were surrounded by the whitest and most impenetrable of mosquito netting. The coloured servants, too, looked sleek and happy, and spotless, in their snowy liveries.
Our host informed us that although since the emancipation of the slaves he paid his ex-slaves a weekly wage, he had purposely kept up the numerous institutions in connection with the plantation which were universal in the slave days, but which many of the native planters had latterly dispensed with, much to the inconvenience and regret of the poor black people, now left, with little or no experience, to their own devices. There was a sort of hospital on this estate, where the sick were looked after, and a nursery, in which the little black gentry were screened from the blazing sun, and carefully watched over by several old ebony and mahogany-tinted ladies deputed for the purpose. At certain hours of the day the mothers were allowed to tend their little ones, and to pass with them a half-hour or so of that supreme bliss which is so dear to every mother's heart.