tinguish the tag that announces government ownership, he will be astounded to note its extraordinary prevalence in Havana. Even Washington was never like this. Government property means public ownership indeed in Cuba. If one may believe the newspapers of the Liberal party, the "outs" under the present administration, the explanation is simple. "Every government employee," they shriek, "down to the last post-office clerk who is in personal favor, has his own private car, free of cost; not only that, but he may use it to give his babies an airing, to carry his cook to market, or to take the future novio of his daughter on a joy ride."

THE new-comer's impressions of Havana will depend largely upon his previous travels. If this is his first contact with the Iberian or the Latin-American civilization, he will find the Cuban capital of great interest. If he is familiar with the cities of old Spain, particularly if he has already seen her farthest-flung descendants, such as Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz, he will probably call Havana "tame.' The most incorrigible traveler will certainly not consider a visit to this most accessible of foreign capitals as time wasted. But his chief amusement will be, in all likelihood, that of tracing the curious dovetailing of Spanish and American influences which make up its present-day aspect.

Both by situation and history the capital of Cuba is a natural place for this intermingling of two essentially different civilizations, but the mixture is more like that of oil and water than of two related elements. The ways of Spain and of America-by which, of course, I mean the United States-are recognizable in every block of Havana, yet there has been but slight blending together, however close the contact.

Immigrants from old Spain tramp the streets all day under their strings of garlic, or jingle the cymbals that mean sweetmeats for sale to all Spanish-speaking children. Venders of lottery-tickets sing their numbers in every public gathering-place. On Saturdays a long procession of beggars of both sexes file through the stores and offices demanding almost as a right the cent each which

ancient Iberian custom allots them. The places where men gather are wideopen cafés without front walls, rather than the hidden dens of the North. Havana's cooking, her modes of greeting and parting, her patience with individual nuisances, her very table manners, are Spanish. Like all Spanish America, her sons and daughters are all highly proficient in the use of the toothpick; like them, they are exceedingly courteous in the forms of social intercourse, irrespective of class. As in Spain, life increases in its intensity with sunset: babies have no fixed hour of retirement; midnight is everywhere the "shank of the evening"; lovers are sternly separated by iron bars, or their soft nothings strictly censored by evervigilant duennas.

The very Government cannot shake off the habits of its forebears, despite the tutelage of a more practical race. Public office is more apt than not to be considered a legitimate source of personal gain. As in Spain, a general amnesty is ever smiling hopefully at imprisoned malefactors. The Spanish tendency to forgive crime, combined with the interrelationship of miscreants and the powers that be, have not merely abolished, in practice, all capital punishment; it tends to release evil-doers long before they have found time to repent and change their ways. Men who shoot down in cold blood-and this they do even in the heart of Havana-have only to prove that the deed was done "in the heat of the moment" to have their punishment reduced to a mere fraction of that for stealing a mule. The pardoning power is wielded with such Castilian generosity that the genial editor of Havana's American newspaper wrathfully suggests the "loosing of all our distinguished assassins," that the enormous cárcel facing the harbor entrance may be replaced by one of the hotels sadly needed to house Havana's "distinguished visitors."

Amid all this the island capital is deeply marked, too, with the influence of what Latin-America calls "the Colossus of the North." One sees it in the strenuous pace of business, in the manners and methods of commerce. The dignified lethargy of Spain has

puzzled air, and before I could finish he had side-stepped and hurried on. I may have been unusually dense that morning, after a night of uproar on the steamer from Key West, for a score of his fellows had passed before I awoke to the fact that they were not American soldiers at all. Cuba has copied nothing more exactly than our army uniform. Cotton khaki survives in place of olive drab, of course, as befits the Cuban climate; frequent washings have turned most of the canvas leggings a creamy white. Otherwise there is little to distinguish the Cuban soldier from our own until he opens his mouth in a spurt of fluent Spanish. He wears the same cow-boy sombrero, with similar hatcords for each branch of the service. He shoulders the same rifle, carries his cartridges in the old familiar web-belt, wears his revolver on the right, as distinct from the left-handed fashion of all the rest of Latin-America. He salutes, mounts guard, drills, stands at attention precisely in the American manner. His "I. D. R." differs from our own only in tongue. The same chevrons indicate non-commissioned rank, though they tend in their size to greater insistence upon it, and have not yet disappeared from the right sleeve. His officers are indistinguishable, at any distance, from our own; they are in many cases graduates of West Point. An angle in their shoulder-bars, with the Cuban seal in bronze above them, and the native coat of arms on their caps in place of the spread eagle, are the only differences that a close inspection of lieutenants or captains brings to light. From majors upward, however, the insignia becomes a series of stars, perhaps because the absence of generals in the Cuban Army leaves no other chance for such ostentation. Snow-white ducks, adorned with the same indications of rank, constitute the dress uniform of officers.

The question naturally suggests itself, "Why does Cuba need an army?" The native answer is apt to be the Spanish version of "Huh, we 're a free country, are n't we? Why should n't we have an army, like any other sovereign people? Poor Estrada Palma, our first president, had no army, with the result that the first bunch of hood

lums to start a revolution had him at their mercy."

These are the two reasons why one sees the streets of Havana, and all Cuba, for that matter, khaki-dotted with soldiers. She has no designs on a trembling world, but an army is to her what long trousers are to a youth of sixteen, proof of his manhood; and she has very real need of one to keep the internal peace within the country, particularly under a Government that was not legally elected and which enjoys little popularity. There were some fourteen thousand "regulars" in the Cuban Army before the European War. Cuba is proud to be numbered among the nations that declared war against Germany. It is seldom, however, that one finds any evidence of personal enmity toward the nation's far-off foes. Cuban soldiers were as eager, no doubt, as the average youths of other lands to have their taste of the European battlefields, and as keenly disappointed that an early armistice denied them the privilege. No small number of men enlisted in Allied armies before the island had thrown off its neutrality, and Cuban subscriptions to the American Liberty Loans were moderately numerous; but both personal observation and the testimony of those in a position to know suggest that the island's chief motives for joining the Allies were that it was the fashion, and that she felt impelled to follow the lead of her big brother to the North. Nor was it her fate to suffer from the recent world holocaust. Instead, she was one of its chief beneficiaries, thanks to several causes, of which the chief was the sky-rocketing price of sugar.

Havana has just celebrated her fourhundredth birthday. She confesses herself the oldest city of European origin in the Western hemisphere. Her name was familiar to ocean wayfarers before Cortes penetrated to the Vale of Anáhuac, before Pizarro had heard the first rumors of the mysterious land of the Incas. When the Pilgrim Fathers sighted Plymouth Rock, Havana had begun the second century of her existence. view of all this, and of the harried career she led clear down to days within the memory of men who still consider them

In

selves youthful, she is somewhat disappointing to the mere tourist for her lack of historical relics. This impression, however, gradually wears off. Her background is certainly not to be compared with that of Cuzco or of the City of Mexico, stretching away into the prehistoric days of legend; yet many reminders of the times that are gone peer through the mantle of modernity in which she has wrapped herself. From the age-worn stones of La Fuerza the bustle of the city of to-day seems a fantasy from dreamland. In the underground passages of old Morro, in the musty dungeons of massive Cabaña, the khaki-clad soldiers of Cuba's new army look as out of place as a motor-car in a Roman arena. The stroller who catches a sudden unexpected glimpse of the cathedral façade is carried back in a twinkling to the days of the Inquisition; Spain herself can show no closer

it the streets grow wider, the buildings more modern, as one advances to the newer residential suburbs. Amusing contrasts catch the eye at every turn within the muzzled portion. Calle Obispo, still the principal business street, is a scant eighteen feet wide, inclusive of its two pathetically narrow sidewalks. The Spanish builders did not foresee the day when it would be an impassable

river of clamoring automobiles. They would be struck dumb with astonishment to see these strange devilwagons housed in the tiled passageways behind the massive carved or brass-studded doors of the regal mansions of colonial days. Their fair ladies would be horrified to find the family chapels turned into bathrooms by desecrating barbarians from the North. Office buildings that seem to have been bodily transported from New York shoulder age-crumbled Spanish churches and convents; crowds as business-bent as those of Wall Street hurry through narrow callejones that seem still to be thinking of Columbus and the bucaneers of the Spanish main. Long rows of massive pillars upholding projecting second stories and half concealing the den-like shops behind them have a picturesque appearance and afford a needed protection from the Cuban sun, but they are little short of a nuisance under modern traffic conditions. Old Colon market is as dark and unsanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day's purchases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. One

link with the Middle Ages than the venerable stone face of San Francisco de Paula. The ghosts of monks gone to their reward centuries ago hover about the post-office where the modern visitor files his telegram or stamps his picture postals. The British occupied it as a barracks when they captured Havana in the middle of the last century, whereby the ancient monastery was considered desecrated, and has served in turn various government purposes; yet the shades of the past still linger in its flowery patio and flit about the corners of its capacious, leisurely old stairways.

Old Havana may be likened in shape to the head of a bulldog, with the mark of the former city wall, which inclosed it like a muzzle, still visible. The portion thus protected in olden days contains most of Havana's antiquity. Beyond

may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial Havana never tasted.

The city is as brilliantly lighted as any of our own, by dusky men who come at sunset, laboriously carrying long ladders, from the tops of which they touch

A Cuban milkman

off each gas-jet as in the days of Tacon. Ferries as modern as those bridging the Hudson ply between the Muelle de Luz and the fortresses and towns across the harbor; but they still have as competitors the heavy old Havana rowboats, equipped, when the sun is high, with awnings at the rear, and manned by oarsmen as stout-armed and weathertanned as the gondoliers of Venice. Automobiles of the latest model snort in continual procession around the Malecón on Sunday afternoons, yet here and there a quaint old family carriage, with its liveried footmen, jogs along between them. Many a street has changed its name since the days of independence, but still clings to its old Spanish title in popular parlance. A new system of house numbering, too, has been adopted, but this has not superceded the old; it has merely been superimposed upon it, until it is a wise door indeed that knows

its own number. To make things worse for the puzzled stranger, the two sides of the street have nothing in common, so that it is nothing unusual to find house No. 7 opposite No. 114.

Havana is most beautiful at night. Its walls are light in color, yellow, orange, pink, pale-blue, and the like prevailing, and the witchery of moonlight, falling upon them, gives many a

quaint corner or narrow street of the old city a resemblance to fairy-land. But when one hurries back to them with a kodak in the morning, it is only to find that the chief charm has fled before the grueling light of day.

The architecture of the city is overwhelmingly Spanish, with only here and there a detail brought from the North. The change from the wooden houses of Key West, with their steep shingled roofs, to the plaster-faced edifices of Havana, covered by the flat azoteas of ArabIberian origin, often the family sitting-room after sunset, is sharp and decided. Among them the visitor feels himself in a foreign land indeed, whatever suggestions of his own he may find in the life of the city. The tendency for low structures, the prevalence of sumptuous dwellings of a single story, the preference for the ground floor as a place of residence, show at a glance that this is no American city. Yet the single story is almost as lofty as two of our own; the Cuban insists on high ceilings, and the longest rooms of the average residence would be still longer if they were laid on their side. To our Northern eyes it is a heavy architecture, but it is a natural development in the Cuban climate. Coolness is the first and prime requisite. Massive outer walls, half their surfaces taken up by immense doors and windows, protected by grat