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.
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.