child," have entered their households, nor was a Cuban father ever known to say to his child, "Till you are twenty-one you belong to me; after that you must shift for yourself." I remember hearing a coachman in Granada, not long ago, relating his family troubles to a sympa thizing friend. His story was extremely funny to me, though not to himself. After his accustomed day's work he had gone home, and his father had attempted to chastise him for not bringing as much money as he thought he ought. "Now, you know, Pepe," said the coachman, "I would not raise my hand to my father, and he drinks a little, too, you know; so I ran away, Pepe; I went to Malaga till such time as the old gentleman could recover his good sense." This tendency to preserve to a late period in life the sentiment of authority and duty among Spaniards has spread to the Cubans, and though the rule of taking the earnings home to the father, as in the case of the Granada coachman, is more frequently revered in Cuba, the tendency of settling their married 66 aware that another family was living above me. And sometimes you find a whole yard full of chickens up there, and a goat or two thrown in. I once climbed to the roof of one of Havana's old houses, searching for an address, and found a populous village up there-chickens, children, dogs, mothers, wives, and husbands. The hospitality of the Cubans is proverbial. They will never eat without inviting their visitors to eat with them, and I have seen the extra ones crowding around the table when there was not room enough, nor food enough, for them all; but plates were passed over heads, FORWARD MARCH" children near them Courtesy of the Plant System is carried out, and accounts for the large mansions in Havana, extensive and splendid enough to be truly denominated palaces. Three or four distinct establishments, or suites of apartments, are found under one roof, occupied by different members of the patriarchal household. This tendency may account also for so many other little houses being built upon the roofs of nearly all the massive old houses of the city proper. When the family got too large for the house, they went to the roof, and there built another house or suite of rooms. I have lived in a house a whole month without being and all got a share. And they are as improvident as they are hospitable. I have been in the field during the war with Cubans two days without food, and on the third day seen them cook a mess of sweet potatoes and fairly gorge themselves with them, and, unable to eat them all, kick the remainder over in the dirt and leave them there, not knowing where they would get their next meal. This profligacy accounts for much of the poverty which they suffer to-day. The abstemiousness of the Spaniard is incomprehensible to the Cuban, and when he meets with real privation and hardship he dies. Nor does domestic economy enter into the household arrangements of the Cuban woman. Unless she belongs to the very poorest class, she must have some one to cook for her and nurse her children. To sew, and sew very nicely, is the extent of her accomplishments. But to return from this digression. Havana, to be rich again, must turn its attention to the country. The country makes the town. Where there are now desolate fields, fifty years ago, yes, twenty years ago, there were productive plantations; and thus princely owners, from the produce of their slave labor, rolled in wealth. This can never be again, for slavery is out of the question; yet Havana must be sustained. It is still a princely city. Strangers complain of ill-smelling streets and foul sewers, to be sure, but on investigation I have found these smells more frequently to proceed from a cook's frying-pan of garlic and oil than from a sewer. It The pavement of Havana is bad. could well be improved upon. But it has its breathing-places-little plazas and parks; but the wealth and gayety that frequented them are lacking. In the old days from ten to fifteen thousand mules laden with the produce of the country entered the city daily. Now our ships are carrying produce there to feed its people. With the exception of the Central Park, the little plazas, parks, and driveways are more or less neglected. To improve the sanitary arrangements and exterminate fever, our own Government has spent something like two millions of dollars, and some people think this has been a useless expenditure. Scarcely any of the money has been expended for permanent works. It has been for work done from day to day, over and over again, as the housekeeper with her broom. When we are gone, will the Cubans keep it up? And if the Cubans so desire to keep it up, from whence will they get their money? At present cigar-making, holding public office, and publishing newspapers are Havana's only industries. This latter is not very profitable, as the writer can attest; and as for the public offices, they can remain profitable only as long as there is sufficient money in the treasury to sustain them, and this money must accrue from the producers who pay the taxes or revenues. Consequently the island of Cuba must be made to produce again. And it will produce. Those fields which are now desolate must be made to produce again. The immense estates which are now abandoned, while their owners are complaining that they have neither capital nor labor to work them, divided into small farms may be made to produce even a greater wealth than they ever did before. Upon the evacuation of the Spaniards, hundreds of American fruit-growers from Florida and farmers from elsewhere came to Havana looking for land. There was land for sale, but it was in immense tracts held at immense prices. The Cuban owners refused to sell in small lots, and the American farmer went home in disgust. That land, still abandoned, is yet for sale, and I know of cases where the owners holding an estate at $500,000 are in want. Havana, with all its princely palaces, its parks and driveways, is in poverty to-day. For a scapegoat upon which to lay the blame, one half its people turn to Spain, the other half to the United States. Like spoiled children that they are, the Cuban is never to blame. You ask him why he doesn't work his fields, he will tell you he has no oxen. You give him oxen, and then he finds that he has no plow. Give him a plow, and something else happens. Yet you pick up a Havana newspaper and you will find a number of advertisements for help. At the government offices you will find hundreds of applicants for official positions; on the plantations, few. plantations not far from Havana five dollars a day in Spanish gold has recently been offered to tobacco-cutters, and even at these wages the supply of labor is wholly inadequate. On Havana has a cleaner administration than it ever witnessed before, and greater educational advantages. But to become again the rich city that it was formerly the agricultural interests must be fostered. If there is not sufficient labor to do the work, immigration must be encouraged. Laws must be enacted to discourage the pernicious holding of immense estates which pay no taxes as long as they produce no rent, and means established for encouraging the small farmers. Thus Havana may once again become a center of wealth, not profligate, but a city from which our ships may sail laden with Cuba's rich produce. By Clifton Johnson WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR COMING IN FROM THE FIELDS N one of the lower ridges ΟΝ of the Knockmealldown Mountains in southern Ireland, overlooking the valley of the Blackwater, dwells a mediæval community of Irish monks. They have separated themselves from the world with all its turmoil and jealousies and follies, and on the quiet of their lonely mountain-top they spend their allotted days in prayer and in peaceful pastoral employment, no longer laboring selfishly, but for the good of the whole brotherhood. I often heard of them in my Irish touring, and at length I decided to make a pilgrimage to their abode. I reached Cappoquin, the railroad station nearest the monastery, in the middle of a warm May forenoon. Mount Melleray, the home of the monks, was three miles back among the hills, and I walked thither, at first following a foot-path across the fields, and then a narrow lane that was bordered much of the way by high banks and walls overgrown with furze full of yellow flower-clusters. Along the horizon, on ahead, loomed the blue, serrated ridge of the Knockmealldown Mountains. The monastery, on one of their lesser northern heights, consists of a good-sized group of substantial stone buildings with a slender-spired church in the midst. The quiet of the hamlet when I entered it savored almost of desertion, and I, half fancying there was something uncanny about the place, was tempted to turn back. But the wide door of the main building stood open, and I went in. One of the monks"the Brother Porter" was his official title-greeted me pleasantly, and was my guide in a leisurely ramble through the buildings, and my instructor as to the ways of the community. He was a gray, elderly man, in a coarse black, hooded gown. About his waist he wore a leather girdle, and on his feet white stockings and rude, low shoes. All the other monks were dressed in the same general style, except that certain of them wore white gowns with black scapulas. These white-garbed monks were the elders, or, as they were called among themselves, the "fathers," of the order. The institution in its origin dates back to 1833, when a group of Irish monks was expelled for political reasons from the Cistercian monastery at Mount Melleray in France. They returned penniless to their native country, and a nobleman living in the valley of the Blackwater took pity on them and gave them a tract of wild land here among the hills. They at once set to work with their own hands to reclaim it. For many years the community was so poverty-stricken that it had a hard struggle for existence, but in time it grew prosperous and independent. The land as the monks found it was a barren heath full of stones. They laboriously dug out the stones, carted them off to be used on the roads or for building purposes, and made the land productive by subsoiling. The task of reclaiming still goes on, and I saw one of the fields where the monks had been recently at work. They had brought the stones to the surface in such quantities that the earth was hidden by them, and the field looked like the dumping-place of refuse from a quarry. It seemed impossible that such a field could. be of any use for agriculture. Certainly, Certainly, if the monks place any value on their time, the labor involved must far exceed in cost the worth of the land when the process is completed. But I suppose they rejoice in difficulties to overcome, and the hardship brings heaven nearer. It About seventy members at present make up the Mount Melleray brotherhood. is not often there are so few, but the monastery has been depopulated by a recent exodus to establish a new colony. Several branches own this for their parent community, including one in the United States at Dubuque, Iowa. The Cistercians were a very powerful order during the Middle Ages, and in the thirteenth century they had nearly two thousand abbeys in the various countries of Europe Among those in Britain were Tintern, Furness, and Melrose, familiar to tourists now as beautiful ruins. Prosperity proved fatal, for as the monks waxed rich they became indolent and deteriorated morally, and the result was that the order speedily decayed and waned until only remnants were left. These Irish monks, with their stony land to subdue and with the memory of their earlier poverty and struggle for existence still fresh, seem to be trying to realize the order's original simplicity. The main tenets of the religion as exemplified by them are separation from the world, longhoured daily devotions, and strict habits of silence and humility. All personal wealth at the time of joining and all the products of the industry of individual members are turned into the community coffers. They work for the common good, and their thoughts dwell on things eternal, or are supposed to. They never speak save when it is absolutely necessary, and even then the ordinary members must do so by medium or by permission of one of the three superiors-the abbot, the prior, or the sub-prior. The only two members not bound by the rules of silence are the brother porter, who communicates with visitors, and the "procurator" or housekeeper, who is privileged to speak to any one when there is occasion. The usual method of communication is by signs, and words are employed only as a last resort. The monks pay no attention to visitors. The weakness of the flesh may result in a sidelong glance or two; but, in theory, the world is naught to them, and so long as you do not actually interfere they go their appointed ways unconcerned whatever you may do. Most members join the order between the ages of twenty and forty. Candidates beyond twoscore seldom meet with favor, because it is believed that a man is by then too old and fixed in his habits and ideas to learn the ways of the brotherhood. They accept no one rashly or in haste. To begin with, the applicant stays for three days at the monastery as a guest. If satisfied with what he sees and learns in these three days, he becomes a "postulant" for three months, and his partial adoption is symbolized by a cloak which he wears over his ordinary worldly garments. After three months' experience, if he continues desirous of going on, he dons a special habit more monkly than he has worn hitherto, and for two years is a "novice," sharing much of the community life, but not yet taking part in all the exercises. At the end of that interval the man who still yearns for complete monkhood takes "simple vows," and enters on a final probationary period of three years. This completed, provided the monks are satisfied with the novitiate's character and are convinced of his sincerity, he may take solemn vows and enter on the full duties and joys of the order. So far as possible, the monks supply their own bodily needs-raise their own food, erect their own buildings, and do their own farm work and housework, even to making bread and washing clothes. The last-named task is done by steam power, and is not as arduous an undertaking as it might be. The wash is hung out to dry on lines in a grassy area near |