The Bad Boy's Delayed Letter about Holland and Cuba--Dad and
the Boy go for a Drive in a Dogcart--They have a Great Time--
Land in Cuba and See the Island t we Fought for.
Havana, Cuba. My Dear Old Greaser: We stopped in Holland for a couple of
days after we left Belgium, and it was the most disappointing country
we visited on our whole trip. We expected to be walked on with wooden
shoes, and from what we had heard of that Duke that married Queen
Wilhelmina, we thought we were going to a country where men were cruel
to their wives, and swatted them over the head when things didn't go
right, but when we saw the queen riding with her husband, as free, from
ostentation as a department store clerk would ride out with his cash
girl wife, and saw happiness beaming on the face of the queen and her
husband, and saw them squeeze hands and look lovingly into each other's
eyes, we made up our minds that you couldn't believe these newspaper
scandals. And when we saw the broad-shouldered, broad-chested and
broad-everywhere women of Holland we concluded that it would be a brave
or reckless husband who would be unkind to one of them, and mighty
dangerous because the women are stronger than the men, and any woman
could whip four men at the drop of the hat, because she could take off
her wooden shoes and strike out and a man would think he had been hit by
a railroad tie.
Illustration: Any woman could whip four men at the drop of the hat 388
I do not know what makes Hollanders wear wooden shoes, unless they are
sentenced to do it, or that they are unruly, and have to be hobbled,
to keep them from jumping fences, but the people are so good and honest
that after you have met them you forget the vaudeville feature of their
costumes, and love them, and wish the people of other countries were as
honest as they. For two or three days we were not robbed, and I do not
believe there is a dishonest man or woman in Holland, except one. There
was one woman that played it on dad in Amsterdam, but I think she only
played him for a sucker for a joke, for she laughed all the time.
Dad was much struck at seeing the women selling milk from little carts,
hauled by teams of big dogs, and he negotiated with a woman for a dog
team and cart, and all one day dad and I put on wooden shoes, and Dutch
clothes and drove the dog team around town, and we had the time of
our lives, more fun than I ever had outside of a circus, but the shoes
skinned our feet, and when the dogs laid down to rest, and dad couldn't
talk dog language to make them get up and go ahead, he kicked the off
dog with his wooden shoe, and the dog got up and grabbed a mouthful of
dad's ample pants and shook dad till his teeth were loose.
[Illustration: Grabbed a mouthful of dad's ample pants 386]
A woman driving another mess of dogs had to come and choke the off dog
so he wouldn't swallow dad, pants and all. Dad gave her a dollar for
rescuing him, and what do you think? Say, she pulled an old stocking of
money out of her bosom and counted out ninety-six cents in change and
gave it back to dad, and only charged four cents for saving his life,
and that couldn't occur in any other country, cause in most places they
would take the dollar and strike him for more.
Dad wanted to take the dog team and cart to Milwaukee to give it to a
friend who sells red hot weiners, and so we arranged to have the team
loaded on the boat, but just before the boat sailed, the dog team was
lying down on the dock, sleeping and scratching flees, when the woman
dad bought the team of came along and spoke to the dogs in Dutch, and,
say, those dogs woke up and started on a regular runaway down the dock,
after the laughing woman, and disappeared up the street. Just as the
boat whistled to pull in the gang planks, dad and I stood on deck and
saw the team disappear, and dad said, “Buncoed again, by gosh, and it is
all your condemned fault. Why didn't you hang on to that off dog.” Well,
we lost our dog team, but we got the worth of our money, for we saw a
people who do not eat much beside cabbage and milk, and they are the
strongest in the world, and there never was a case of dyspepsia in their
country. We saw a people with stone bruises on their heels and corns on
their toes, smiling and laughing all the time. We met a people that work
all the time, and never take any recreation except churning and rocking
babies, and yet never have to call a doctor, because there are no
doctors except veterinary surgeons, who care for dogs and cattle.
The people we met in Holland wear wooden shoes to teach them patience
and humility. With wooden shoes no frenzied financier of Holland will
ever travel the fast road of speculation, slip on a bucket-shop banana
peel, and fall on the innocent bystander who has coughed up his savings
and given them to the honest financier to safely invest.
The bank of Holland is an old woolen stock ing, and money never comes
out of the stocking unless there is a string to it, and the string is
the heart string of an honest people, that will stand no trifling. If a
dishonest financier came to Holland from any other country, and did any
of his dirty work, the women of Holland, who handle the funds, would
give him such a hazing that he would never open his three-card monte
lay-out in any other country.
It is a country where you get the right change back, and the cows give
eighteen carat milk, and the hens have not learned to lay small, cold
storage eggs. It is the country for me, if the women would wear corsets,
and not be the same size all the way down, so that if you hugged a girl
you wouldn't make a dent in her, that would not come out until she got
her breath.
And we left such a country and such a people, to come here to Cuba,
where the population now comprises the meanest features of the desperate
and wicked Spaniards, beaten at their own game of loot, the trickiness
of the native Cuban, flushed with pride because his big American brother
helped him to drive away the Spaniard that he could never have gotten
rid of alone, and with no respect for the American who helped, and only
meets him respectfully because he is afraid of being thrown into the
ocean if he is impudent, and the worst class of Yankee grafters and
highway robbers that have ever been allowed to stray away from the land
of the free. That is what Cuba is to-day.
Soulless Yankee corporations have got hold of most of the branches of
business that there is any money in, and the things that do not pay and
never can be made to pay, are for sale to tenderfeet. The cuban hates
the Yankee, the Yankee hates the Cuban, and the Spaniard hates both, and
both hate him. In Havana your hotel, owned by a Cuban, run by a Yankee,
with a Spanish or Portuguese cashier, will take all the money you bring
into it for a bed at night, and hold your baggage till your can cable
for money to buy breakfast. It is a “free country,” of course, run by
men who will fly high as long as they can borrow money for some one else
to pay after they are dead, but within ten years the taxes will eat the
people so they will be head over heels in debt to the Yankee and the
Spaniard, the German and the Englishman, the Frenchman and the Italian,
and some day warships will sail into Havana harbor, over the submerged
bones of the “Maine,” and there will be a fight for juicy morsels of the
Cuban dead horse, by the congregated buzzards of strange navies, unless
they shall shake the dice for the carcass, and by carefully loading the
dice saw the whole thing off on to Uncle Sam, and make him pay the debts
of the deceased republic, and act as administrator for the benefit of
the children of the sawed off republic, whose only asset now is climate
that feels good, but contains germs of all diseases, and tobacco that
smells good when it is in conflagration under your nose, and does not
kill instantly if it is pasted up in a Wisconsin wrapper, that is the
pure goods. If tobacco ever ceases to be a fad with the rich consumer
of fifty-cent cigars, and beet sugar is found to contain no first aid
to Bright's disease, Cuba will amount to about as much as Dry Tortugas,
which has purer air, and the Isle of Pines, which has more tropical
scenery and less yellow fever. But now the Island of Cuba is a joy, and
Havana is like Heaven, until you come to pay your bill, when it is hell.
Streets so wide you cannot see a creditor on the other side, pavements
as smooth as the road to perdition, and tropical trees, plants and
flowers, with birds of rare plumage, you feel like sitting on a cold
bench in the shade, and wishing all your friends were here to enjoy a
taste of what will come to those who are truly good, in the hereafter,
when suddenly you are taken with a chill up the spinal column, and a
cold sweat comes out on the forehead, and the internal arrangements go
on a strike because of the cold, perspiring cucumber you had for lunch,
and you go to the doctor, who does not do a thing to you, but scare you
out of your boots by talking of cholera, and giving you the card of
his partner, the undertaker, telling you never to think of dying in a
tropical country without being embalmed, because you look so much better
when you are delivered at your home by the express company, and then he
gives you pills and a bill, and an alarm clock that goes off every hour
to take a pill by, and furnishes you an officer to go home to your hotel
with you to collect his bill, and you pawn your watch and sleeve buttons
for a steerage ticket to New York, where you arrive as soon as the Lord
will let you, and stay as long as He thinks is good for you.
Dad has not been much good in Havana, cause he wanted to see the whole
business in one day. He got a row boat and went out in the harbor to
where the back-bone of the “Maine” acts as a monument to the fellows who
yet sleep in the mud of the bottom, and after tying a little American
flag on the rigging that sticks up above the water, and damning the
villains who blew up the good ship, we went back to town and drove out
to the cemetery where several hundred of our boys are buried, where we
left flowers on the graves and a cuss in the balmy air for the guilty
wretches who fired the bomb, and then we went back to the city and
walked the beautiful streets, until dad began to have cramps, from
trying to eat all the fruit he could hold, and then it was all off, and
I was going to call a carriage to take him to the hotel, when dad saw a
negro astride a single ox, hitched to a cart, who had come in from the
country, and dad said he wanted to ride in that cart, if it was the last
act of his life, and as dad was beginning to swell up from the fruit he
had eaten, I thought he better ride in an open cart, cause in a carriage
he might swell up so we couldn't get him out of the door when we got to
the hotel, so I hired the negro, got dad in the cart, and we started,
but the ox walked so slow I was afraid we would never get dad there
alive, so I told the negro dad had the cholera, and that settled, for
he kicked the slats of the ox in with his heels, and the ox bellowed and
run away, and the negro turned pale from fright, and I guess the runaway
ride on the cobble stone pavement was what saved dad's life, for the
swelling in dad's inside began to go down, and when we got to the hotel
he got out of the cart alone, and I knew he was better, for he shook
himself, gulluped up wind, and said, “You think you are smart, don't
you?” So I will close.
Yours,
Hennery.
[Illustration: The ox bellowed and run away 382]