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with their superfluous summons to matins which no one attended. Sleep was next to an impossibility under these hard conditions, and I wanted more and not less of it when I had the duties upon me of sightseeing. Sleep or no sleep, however, I determined that I would see what I could as long as I could keep going. A few hundred yards off was one of the most famous of the Havana cigar manufactories. A courteous message from the manager, Se単or Bances, had informed me that he would be happy to show me over it on any morning before the sun was above the roofs of the houses. I found the se単or a handsome elderly gentleman, tall and lean, with Castilian dignity of manner, free and frank in all his communications, with no reserve, concealments, or insincerities. I told him that in my experience cigars were not what they had been, that the last good one which I had smoked I had bought twenty years ago from a contrabandista at Madrid. I had come to Havana to see whether I could find another equally good at the fountain head. He said that he was not at all surprised. It was the same story as at Jamaica ; the consumption of cigars had increased with extreme rapidity, the area on which the finest tobacco had been grown was limited, and the expense of growing it was very great. Only a small quantity of the best cigars was now made for the market. In general the plants were heavily manured, and the flavour suffered. Leaf of coarse fibre was used for the core of the cigars, with only a fold or two wrapped round it of more delicate quality. He took me into the different rooms where the manufacture was going on. In the first were perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty sallow-faced young men engaged in rolling. They were all Cubans or Spaniards with the exception of a single negro; and all, I should think, under thirty. On each of the tables was one of the names with which we have grown familiar in modern cigar shops,