'what can this mean? Morocco shoes for an Havana foot!!! The Havana lady's foot is, in fact, a sort of lusus naturæ,-having nearly the smallness, without the deformity, of the famous golden lilies of China. Her finely-formed and voluptuous head turns gracefully upon the taper neck. The waist is slender, but never compressed by corsets, so that it retains all its natural proportions. The constant warmth of the atmosphere preserves the suppleness of the limbs, and gives a velvet softness to the skin, which seems to radiate through the generally pale cheek,-a sort of subdued glow like that which is seen in the female faces of Titian. Her languid movements, slow step, and gentle tones, contrast sometimes singularly enough with the expressive glances that shoot from her long black eyes. She never sees the sun, except when she travels; and never goes out of the house in the day-time, or on foot. She employs her morning in needle-work and during the heat of the day bathes or reposes in her butaca, (arm-chair.) At nightfall, the graceful sylph, in her white robe and natural flowers, enters her volante and drives to the shops or the promenade. In travelling, however, she shows no want of resolution, but boldly encounters the sun without hat or umbrella. The Havana ladies are extravagantly fond of dancing, and will pass whole nights in enjoying this amusement, until they actually faint from exhaustion. The leader of the orchestra on these occasions, and principal master of the revels,-the Straus of the Havana,-is the elegant negro Placido. He composes the airs himself, and nothing can be more original than his compositions, unless it be his costume, which is precisely that of the year 1798 in France. He wears a swallow-tail coat, yellow small-clothes tied at the knees with ribbands, silk stockings, and kid shoes with pink roses, and lace ruffles over his hands and breast."

This elegantly attired gentleman, is the same who figured as one of the leaders in the late conspiracy, and was recently executed at the Havana. He seems to have been a person of superior talent, and composed poetry as well as music. We have seen a sonnet which he wrote after being committed to prison.

"The dress of the Havana ladies, though simple, is very expensive. They wear in the morning a loose muslin robe, and, in the evening, another of the same stuff, but made with short sleeves, and very low in the neck. They put nothing on their heads but a simple natural flower. Their linen is the finest cambric, trimmed with lace, and they change it several times in the day. Their muslin dresses, which are all embroidered and trimmed with lace, are worn only till they require washing, and are then given to the servants. An Havana lady wears no other than silk stockings, and these must be quite new: after putting them on once she throws them aside. Her little shoes are changed with the same frequency. She never wears a dress twice to a ball: she would rather not go than appear a second time in the same costume, although of the richest kind and imported at great expense from Paris. Her bed linen, like all the rest, is of

the finest cambric; and great was my surprise, when I was presented for the first time with a cambric towel, trimmed with lace, and starched. The bedsteads are of iron, with sacking bottoms, covered with damask. In compliment to my European habits, my aunt has provided me with a little mattrass about as thick as a wafer, covered with blue damask. The pillows are of the same material: the pillow covers and curtains are of muslin, richly embroidered, trimmed with lace, and tied with blue ribbands: the upper sheet, which is the only coverlet ever used, is always trimmed with lace. Imagine what, by the side of all this, must have been the effect of my plain Holland chemises, and thread stockings, to say nothing more of that last and worst of all errors in costume, morocco shoes !!!"

In this picture, we see little more than a reflexion, under some modifications, of the fashionable life of Europe. It is, perhaps, not unnatural that our fair Countess, fresh from the Fauxbourg St. Germains and the Académie de Musique, with all her aristocratic prejudices and habits about her, should be perfectly enchanted with every thing she sees, and should consider these little Havana beauties, with their Chinese feet, satin slippers and Brussels lace towels, as real fairies in comparison with our "wild women of the West." For ourselves, without engaging in a controversy with her upon this question, which we may safely leave to the reader's decision, we proceed to offer a few comments upon the vegetable wealth of the island of Cuba, which probably excels that of any other part of the world. No stronger proof can be found of the paramount influence of political institutions in determining the condition of communities, than the fact that the comparatively unproductive territory of the United States should have been, from its first settlement, the great receptacle of the emigration from Europe, and have advanced in population and wealth with a rapidity never known before, while Cuba, which was settled a century earlier, has remained stagnant and uninhabited for three hundred years, and even now, when it is in a state of more rapid progress, has received its impulse chiefly from its vicinity to our country. Enjoying a perpetual summer, combined with a luxuriance and variety of vegetation, hardly paralleled in any other region,-pouring forth, at the slightest touch of cultivation, two or three crops in a season of the most delicious and nutritive products,-oranges, pine-apples, plantains, bananas, cocoa, coffee, sugar, maize and tobacco,-not to mention a great number of others, whose very names are scarcely known abroad,-this favoured land wants nothing but men

to turn its advantages to account, and enjoy their results, to be acknowledged as the garden of the world. At present, with a geographical extent about equal to that of Great Britain and Ireland, and a capacity for production beyond all comparison superior, it supports about half a million of white inhabitants, and about as many more of the colored race,the greater part of them employed in cultivating sugar, coffee and tobacco for foreign markets, while the maize, the banana and the orange, which would sustain, with moderate labor, in abundance and luxury, a native population of almost any density, are cultivated only in subordination to those we have mentioned, and especially sugar, which, nevertheless, yields, of late, but scanty profits.

The Countess' two letters on the botany and agriculture of the island, contain some errors hardly less amusing than those which we have pointed out in the account of the United States, and which exhibit, like them, an apparent absence of the organ of number. Thus, she attributes to Baron Humboldt the statement, that the island, in its greatest breadth, is thirty-seven degrees, or about 2700 miles wide. In the same passage, she states the length at 227 leagues, or about 700 miles, so that it would be, according to her calculation, a good deal broader than it is long. It is hardly necessary to say that she has confounded the degree of latitude with the breadth of the island. In general, however, these two letters appear to be founded on good materials, furnished, no doubt, by her family connexions, who are large cultivators, and are very interesting. We select a few passages as specimens. A satisfactory work on the botany of this magnificent island, would be a most valuable acquisition to the science. How far the deficiency in this respect may have been supplied by the extensive, and, as we understand, splendidly executed work on the natural history of Cuba, which has been undertaken by Don Ramon de la Sagra since his return to Europe, and which he is now publishing at Paris, we are not informed.

The product of a sugar plantation is stated, from calculations published by the Patriotic Society, at about fifteen per cent. on the capital invested. The wood employed in these establishments is cut indiscriminately in the most convenient forest, without regard to the wants of the future; and, if the same system should be acted on hereafter, the island will gradually be stripped of all its timber. It is calculated that

the caballerias (two acres each) of woodland regularly cut, would maintain a perpetual supply for a plantation of the usual extent. A forest of this size, five or six leagues from Havana, would give an annual revenue of about fifty dollars per day, or $18,250 a year, which, deducting expenses at $8,500, leaves a net profit of $9,750 upon a capital of $12,000. The culture of the orange tree might be made still more productive. The growth of the native orange tree is very rapid. Three years after the seed is deposited, the tree is twelve or fifteen feet high, and the fourth year it produces a hundred oranges. At ten years of age it bears from three to four thousand; and as the fruit remains a long time upon the tree, the blossoms of the next crop are seen by the side of the ripe product of the last. In its perfect state, the tree exhibits at the same time its rich deep green foliage, its perfumed flowers, and its glowing, golden fruit,-affording altogether the most splendid spectacle in the whole vegetable world. It should, however, be engrafted with the China variety, which is the most delicate of all, and comes to still higher perfection in Cuba. This retards the growth two or three years. The trees are planted at twenty paces distance from each other. A caballeria contains about 3,800, each bearing, on an average, 1500 fruits, which, at the usual rate of four dollars the thousand, give a gross product of $20,860, and, deducting for expenses about $3,000, a net profit of $19,800, upon a capital of less than $25,000. This mine of wealth is almost entirely unexplored. The trees are planted in great numbers, on most of the coffee and sugar estates, as borders to the avenues and lines of division; but the planters do not even take the trouble to gather the fruit. The pine-apple, perhaps the most highly-flavored of all fruits, might be turned to much greater account than it is now, by employing the fibres of the leaf in the manufacture of cloth. They have the strength of flax and the softness and brilliancy of silk. We have ourselves seen cloth, made of this article, fully equal in delicacy, and superior in brilliancy, softness and beauty to the finest cambric. This fruit is so abundant in Cuba, that the best sell in the market at a cent a piece. In this favored region, the potato reaches so large a size, that one will nourish a man for twenty-four hours. But the plantain, or banana, is the most important of the vegetable products of the island, as it furnishes the principal food of the colored population. It is eaten raw or in various

forms of preparation; and is, at once, highly nutritious and exceedingly agreeable to the palate, so that the slaves in Cuba make their ordinary food of one of the greatest dainties that can be eaten, which they are allowed at discretion. The tree that produces this precious article is an annual one. It rises to the height of eight or ten feet, where it throws off a cluster of immense leaves, five or six feet long, by two or three broad, and among them a single bunch of fifty or sixty fruits. We are surprised to find the Countess stating that the banana produces a "multitude of bunches." It is perfectly well known to all, who have ever seen it, that each plant bears only one. The plant dies at the end of the year, and the next year another springs up from the root. The Countess states that there are two kinds of this fruit, the male and the female; and that the latter is the finest and most abundant. This is her method of telling us that the plant is of the dioecious order: the fruits are, of course, found only on the female tree. The different qualities, to which she alludes, belong to the different varieties of the plant, the two principal of which, musa paradisiaca and musa sapientium, are called in English plantain and banana. The fruit of the latter is of smaller size and greater delicacy than that of the other, and is probably the one described by the Countess as the female.

RICE is pretty extensively used in Cuba, but above half the quantity consumed is imported from this country. Coffee, which was at one time the most important product of the island, is now less profitable, and is said to afford only four per cent. on the capital invested, even on the best administered estates. If not the most productive, the coffee plantations are by far the most beautiful of any, and form the great ornaments of the interior of the island. Indeed, an extensive and well-managed coffee estate, with its long avenues and enclosures of palm and orange trees, its innumerable lines of coffee plants, overshadowed by intervening bananas and interspersed with groups of the various other useful and ornamental trees, that are found in such boundless profusion on the island, the whole blooming in the rich luxuriance of perennial vegetation,-seems to verify the visions of an earthly paradise. The seed of the coffee-plant comes up in about six weeks after it is deposited: at two years old the plant is cut down to the height of four or five feet. The Countess states that the Arabs permit it to reach twenty-five or thirty