Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DAYS IN HAVANA " They have wooed me from my own."—Prom " Outlawed." It has always seemed to me that the most interesting Havana exhibits herself not often to those who seek her en passant, but continuously to those of us who reside here, and, without desiring to observe, or consciously observing, come to know details of life here as one learns to know the printed characters of a book in a foreign language. At first sight they are strange and meaningless; as they acquire a sense to us they lose the oddity we do not see again unless we pause to consider them, and compare. Then, with an effort, we can observe the peculiarities as a stranger does, realizing, further, their true import, as he cannot. There is nothing more refreshing when one is afflicted with the old-timer's passionate hate of Havana and all her works, as on occasions we all are, than to go forth into the city determined to behold it for the thousandth time as though one had never set eyes upon it before. Here is a capital over which, at four-thirty in the morning, the deep, resonant bells of an ancient cathedral boom, ponderous and mellow. Already, at that hour, boys with long poles are shutting off the gas lamps up and down the narrow streets of the lower city ; the arc- lights in the parks and on the promenades have sputtered their last, and died. Before the heavy doors of all the houses, their giddy colors paled in the twilight of dawn, along all the cobbled streets, there are garbage boxes and barrels, left scattered at every angle, in the wake of the army of street cleaners, who charge through the town between midnight and daybreak, shouting to each other and from gang to gang, whooping up their mules, banging the receptacles they empty against their carts, and otherwise shattering th...