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Updated: June 19, 2025
These two places have some interesting country residences, where the wealthiest citizens of Havana spend their summers. The village of Quemados is also in this immediate neighborhood, about a couple of leagues from town; here is situated the Havana Hippodrome, where horse-races take place in the winter season.
Hong Kong, only forty miles across the estuary, bristles with commercial prosperity. The British government permits Hong Kongers to bet on horse-races, buy and sell stocks, and promote devious companies, but forbids fan-tan and lotteries. There is, consequently, a daily flow of men, women, and dollars between Hong Kong and Macao.
So there were horse-races and cock-fights and bear-baitings, as well as dinners and suppers, at which much sack and aqua vitæ was drunk to king, church, and reigning beauties. And if a quarrel sprung, full armed, from the heated brains of young gallants, crossed rapiers did but add a piquancy, a dash of cayenne, to life.
It seemed to do us all good to get a glimpse of the solemn, earnest face of the President, who reviewed us with apparent satisfaction. April 7. Picket details returned from the river to-day. In the afternoon several horse-races came off near our camp, between the First Pennsylvania, the First New Jersey, and Harris Light.
He slighted the plaudits of their theatre, he abhorred their dances and their horse-races, he was abstinent even at a festival, and incorrupt himself, perpetually admonished the dissipated citizens of their impious abandonment of the laws of their country. The Antiochians libelled their emperor, and petulantly lampooned his beard, which the philosopher carelessly wore neither perfumed nor curled.
From this point I observed the Indians running horse-races and otherwise enjoying themselves behind the line they had held against me the day before. The squaws decked out in gay colors, and the men gaudily dressed in war bonnets, made the scene most attractive, but as everything looked propitious for the dangerous enterprise in hand I spent little time watching them.
There used once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course.
Every man of them was equally healthy, muscular, loud, hard-hearted, clean-skinned, and rough; every man of them drank the same draughts of beer, smoked the same short pipes all day long, rode the best horse, shot over the best dog, and put the best bottle of wine in England on his table at night; every man of them sponged himself every morning in the same sort of tub of cold water and bragged about it in frosty weather in the same sort of way; every man of them thought getting into debt a capital joke and betting on horse-races one of the most meritorious actions that a human being can perform.
They attended horse-races and cock-fights, almost always with some money on the outcome, and frequently with a horse or cock entered in the races or the pittings. And when the sport was over, they would accompany the planters home to dinner, which ended in a drinking-bout, and it was seldom the parson who went under the table first.
The programme for the next day contained nothing till 5 p.m., when there were more horse-races, then Vespers in the Matrice, brilliantly illuminated; after dusk fireworks outside the Trapani Gate, and at night a concert in the illuminated balio. In the afternoon of Wednesday, the 28th, a procession of fifty-nine mules and horses passed through the town.
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