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Updated: June 10, 2025
So we will follow Ruez to the volante, and dash away with him and Don Gonzales to the Paseo, for a circular drive. "I left General Bezan and Isabella together in the drawing-room," began Ruez to his father, just as they passed outside of the city walls. "Yes. I knew he was there," said the father, indifferently. "That was a very singular affair that occurred between him and the Countess Moranza."
N. B. Rum is not a wicked word in Cuba; in Boston everybody is shocked when it is named, and in Cuba nobody is shocked when it is drunk. And here endeth the description of our visit to the sugar-plantation of Don Jacinto, and in good time, too, for by this it had grown so hot, that we made a feeble rush for the volante, and lay back in it, panting for breath.
Oh, how much comfort is in a little cup of chocolate! what an underpinning does it afford our spiritual house, a material basis for our mental operations! In its support, we go it a little longer on the Plaza, see more masks, hear more guitars and "catch-this-rat!" and finally return, in a hired volante, to the Ensor House, where rest and the bedless cots await us.
Nearly all transportation, except it be on the line of the railroads, is accomplished on mule-back, or on the little Cuban horses. The fact is, road making is yet to be introduced into the island. Even the wonderful volante can only make its way in the environs of cities. Most of the so-called roads resemble the bed of a mountain torrent, and would hardly pass for a cow-path in America.
We had a four-wheeled barouche, with two horses, which costs two dollars an hour; whereas a volante can be hired only at eight dollars and a half per whole afternoon, no less time, no less money. As it holds but two, or, at the utmost, three, this is paying rather dear for the glory of showing one's self on the Paseo.
I refuse, I prodigate expressions of my humility, of my determination to take the second place, leaving the first to her; briefly, I take the second volante, Manuela springing to my side. After some discontent, appeased by dear Don Miguel, who is veritably an angel, and wants but death to transport him among the saints, Concepcion mounts in the first volante.
Thus we had passed through the Rue d'Arcola, the Rue de Kleber, the Rue d'Egypte, and the Rue d'Artillerie Volante, before we found ourselves in the great central square in which the headquarters of the army were situated.
One reaches San Antonio in an hour and a half, and finds a pleasant village, with a river running through it, several streets of good houses, several more of bad ones, a cathedral, a cockpit, a volante, four soldiers on horseback, two on foot, a market, dogs, a bad smell, and, lastly, the American Hotel, a house built in a hollow square, as usual, kept by a strong-minded woman from the States, whose Yankee thrift is unmistakable, though she has been long absent from the great centres of domestic economy.
About the door of the long, rambling posada, a dozen or more horses were seen tied to a long bar, erected for the purpose, but no wheeled vehicles were there. The roads are only fit for equestrians, and hardly passable even for them. At rare intervals one gets a glimpse of the volante, now so generally discarded in the cities, and which suggested Dr.
The other angel of deliverance is the volante, with its tireless horses and calesero, who seems fitted and screwed to the saddle, which he never leaves. He does not even turn his head for orders. His senses are in the back of his head, or wherever his mistress pleases. "José, calle de la muralla, esquina á los oficios," and the black machine moves on, without look, word, or sign of intelligence.
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