I noticed here, as often before, deep scars on the women’s necks, cheeks, and arms, frightfully disfiguring, and painfully suggestive, but I was relieved to find it is only the effects of their favorite custom of tattooing. I thought before, that nature and the most servile of drudgery had carried the ugliness of these poor wretches to the extremest verge of possibility, but I find that, in that “deep,” as well as in all others, there is still a “lower deep.”
We were also puzzled to divine the import of immense round cushions fastened securely upon nearly all the women’s heads, but soon discovered they were to make a comfortable seat for the immense burdens of sugar going from one house to another; for all the ordinary burdens we had before seen, carried on the head (negroes here have no idea that their heads were made for any other use) had been simply with the aid and comfort of the woolly padding of nature.
_Dear old Mr. R---- -- Chess and Whist and Life--Good Friday--A Religious Procession--The silence of the Town--The Miserere--To Matanazas--Company in the Cave--Father M----’s approach to Matanzas--The Bay--Valley of the Yumuri--The Plaza--The Dominica--The Ensor House--Easter Sunday--The Paseo--Steamer to Havana--A Night on board--“Queen’s Hotel”--Tricks on a Travelling Author--Theft on the Almanac._
Yesterday the train brought dear old Mr. R---- to see us. In addition to our former chess and conversations on literature and art, he reads French, gives me lessons in Spanish, and occupies all the time that would otherwise have made this a bigger if not a wiser or a better letter.
I have often suggested to you the resemblance between the game of chess and the game of life. It occurs to me at this moment, that, if this be true, fatalism must also be true. These inhabitants of chessdom are forced about by an inevitable will; their success and ruin are equally beyond their own let or hindrance. They are created as we are, with certain powers and spheres for action and being; with certain possibilities which, whether they will or not, may become impossibilities, but with, alas! impossibilities which must remain such.
From an inevitable force of circumstances, the great and powerful in chess may become weak; the insignificant may have a greatness thrust upon them. The humble pawn can at times act with the dignity of a queen; the queen is often less powerful than the little plebeian beside her. The bishops, in their attempts to serve royalty, often sacrifice themselves; the knights sometimes ruin the queen they are sworn to protect. The queen has the position many other women would like,--she is the only female in her empire. But, alas! this dizzying distinction sometimes spoils her wits: in trying to rule her allies and conquer her enemies, she is too apt to destroy herself and her kingdom. Her king and lord lives mostly in _statu quo_-ism. He would be her admiring imbecile except that he has found out the secret of endless life: “The king never dies.” He may at times, it is true, be a wandering Jew, but he is an immortal one; he can well afford to be besotted with inertia, for he is too wise to die. But this wisdom is also his fatality. All that he and his queen or subjects do or refrain from doing is foreordained; their entire existence seems to me an admirable illustration of the doctrine of predestination.