Captain B—— and his wife are graciously willing to wait our pleasure, while we linger idly content, but we must not trespass too long upon their indulgence; so we enter the coach and rumble up the steep narrow streets after four lustrous army mules. Our driver, a native Puerto Rican, speaks to the mules in English, and ready with the explanation before I could form the question, Captain B—— says: “Yes, the boys use English, because their mules were brought here from the States, and of course they wouldn’t understand if the boys spoke Spanish to them.” Stopping for the passage of an army freight wagon, it seemed very comical to me to hear those Puerto Rican lads “gee-hawing” to the sleek American mules.
If the politics of our American cities could be as well administered as those of San Juan appear to be from the cleanliness and order of her streets we would indeed have cause to rejoice. The streets of San Juan were so clean that even the trailer of skirts might for once be forgiven her lack of common decency. She could have walked the full length of San Juan and not gathered up as much filth as she would in one block of one of our Northern sidewalks. Such was the cleanliness of the place that again and again we exclaim over the fine condition of the city; and Captain B—— bore out our impression that Uncle Sam had done his house-cleaning most effectively, and was now trying to maintain that condition by educating a force of native police,—“spigitys,” our boys call them.
As we were going through the Plaza we saw a great crowd on the far side, gathered about a regular American “trolley-car,” and wondering at their enthusiastic demonstrations, we were told that this was the first trip of the first electric car in Puerto Rico—a great step toward becoming Americanised.
IV.
We were in the Captain’s hands, and although Sister and Daddy were decorously unquestioning as to where we were going and what we were to do when we got there, Little Blue Ribbons and I couldn’t refrain from asking, when we found ourselves clattering out of San Juan to the tattoo of the hard little hoofs, if the Captain intended to drive us to Ponce? “Oh, hardly, this evening,” he laughingly replied. “I thought we would merely take a spin out a way on the military road to give you a glimpse of the country. The madam has planned a Puerto Rican dinner for you at the Colonial, and afterward there is to be a concert on the Plaza.” “Simply fine,” I said, “I do so enjoy trying the native bills of fare” (but alas, for their after effects!).
The military road, a beautiful macadamised highway, swept through a country whose surface was richly covered with broad pasture lands where many cattle were grazing. The plains were fairly peppered with palm-trees, which, owing to their long trunks and pluming tops, interfered but little with the pasture beneath. The military road is fringed by these noble trees, at least as far as we go, and although now to us a necessary feature in the West Indian landscape, I never weary of their aristocratic grace. We must have gone some miles when the madam suggested our return. A crack of the whip, a vociferous shouting to the mules, and the coach faces right about with military precision for San Juan. With many a bewildering twist and turn through the upper town, we reach the Morro headland, and are glad enough to leave the coach and throw ourselves into the deep grass, where we sit a long time looking out to sea.