FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 185 



for a Spanish squadron to drop anchor under the 

 Morro and land Spanish troops that might on this 

 careless holiday undo all the work of the war. If 

 this, I argued in my midnight wrath, was the only 

 way in which the Cubanos could celebrate an 

 independence that they owed to others and would 

 never have wrested for themselves, pity was that 

 they did not still depend. Fortunately the heavens, 

 tired of the mock artillery of fireworks, treated the 

 capital that Sunday night to such a display of 

 blinding lightning, deafening thunder and drowning 

 rain as put a term to the witches' sabbath in the 

 fast-emptying streets. 



Much of the uncouth revelry of this anniversary 

 is aided and abetted by well-to-do young students, 

 who are the moving spirit of this unclean gala. 

 It was at their hands that during the celebrations I 

 was the unwilling witness of one of the most revolt- 

 ing cases of horrible cruelty to animals that ever 

 came to my notice. A party of this gilded youth, 

 fifteen or twenty in number, had tethered an 

 unfortunate largfe livingf crab to a string- and were 

 dragging it over the hot pavements. This in itself 

 must have been most painful to their cold-blooded 

 prisoner, but it was as a mother's caress beside 

 what, to my amazement and horror, I next saw. 

 A squib was inserted in one of the claws and ex- 

 ploded with a terrific concussion that could have 

 been nothing short of dreadful agony. This was 

 repeated again and again until, looking round in 

 vain for one of the police (who, to my knowledge, 

 are bound, if called on, to interfere in such cases) 

 and not feeling equal to the task of bringing my 

 enigmatical Spanish to the defence of the unhappy 



