“Only a few coasting craft like the Alice there; you’ll get no news, neither letters nor papers, till I bring them to you six weeks from now; not even a telegram; there’s no cable!”
This gave our adventure a delightful tinge of aloofness. We slept on board that night, and the next morning watched our belongings carried ashore,—trunks, band-boxes, tables, chairs, beds, mosquito nettings, and a grand piano. My father did not love music, but it was part of the family creed that Mama could not exist without a piano. “She shall have music wherever she goes!”
Our arrival had a quasi-official character; we were the guests of the President, who had lent my father one of the presidential palaces for our residence. The palace was built Spanish fashion around a patio. A wide corridor surrounded the court on the second story, from which opened our living rooms. A guard of honor, half a dozen ragged soldiers and their horses, were lodged on the ground floor. I still remember the strong impressions of this, my first day in a foreign country. I can see the picturesque streets of the oldest European city in the new world, for many years the most important place in the Western hemisphere. Its character and language are Spanish, its people of mixed blood are of every shade of complexion, their manners truly Spanish, courtly, grave, and kindly.
We landed on the morning of the twenty-second of February; that evening we celebrated Washington’s Birthday by a dinner at the hotel. There were speeches, red fire, toasts, and a general jollification. The Tybee’s officers and passengers were all present, as well as the few Americans established at Santo Domingo, among whom were a Mr. and Mrs. Shumacher and a couple by the name of Gabb. The men all wore white linen, the women white muslin.
The two months that followed were among the most delightful of my life. We enjoyed a series of calm summer days, only broken by an occasional violent thunder shower in the afternoon. Very quickly the old palace became homelike with flowers, birds, and friendly visitors at every hour of the day and evening. Grave men, like Don Leonardo Delmonto, the land agent, Señor Gauthier, the Secretary of State, Curriel, the Minister of War, who came to consult with Papa; lonely men, exiles from every corner of the world, who came to talk with Mama, and a shoal of girls and boys who came to play and dance with “las muchachas” (the girls)!
Our day usually began with an excursion to the bathing beach. The first trip was made in an antediluvian hack, the only vehicle in the city; after that we rode our little Dominican ponies, Arabians with the paso Castiliano, a sort of delicious canter, the best imaginable gait for a warm climate. The bathing place was a beautiful little basin under a beetling crag; the sands were fine and gold-colored, the water warm as the Lido in August. We might not venture to swim outside this basin on account of sharks. On the way home we halted at a coconut grove, where a tall, barefoot boy swarmed up a palm tree and brought down fresh green coconuts, still cool with the night’s dew. He bored a hole in the rough outer shell with a gimlet; the fresh coconut milk glug-glugged into the tiny calabash I carried at my saddlebow, and I drained a draft that is the nearest thing to nectar I have known.
There were often guests at the eleven o’clock breakfast, where many native dishes were served. We came to like the cassava bread, the rice cooked in coconut milk, the fried plantains, and the orange wine. The cuisine was a combination of Creole and Spanish cookery, much to my liking. The long table was spread in the open corridor with the big columns, between which swung gilded cages with bright plumed birds and porous earthenware jars in which our drinking water was cooled. Ice was a luxury, reserved for great occasions. Every day some of our new friends sent a basket of wonderful strange fruit, sapotes, custard apples, caweelias, endless varieties of bananas; the best of these I have never seen since,—a tiny yellow kind, called the fig banana.
After breakfast came the Spanish lessons; indeed these went on most of the day, for our young friends could speak no other language and we were soon all chattering like magpies. In the evening Papa read Don Quixote aloud, so it was in a truly Spanish atmosphere that I first learned to love the great Don and all his company. At four o’clock, when the sea breeze sprang up, the horses were brought round and the whole party rode out into the country, attended by a large escort. Whatever else our Dominican friends lacked, they had plenty of time to devote to us. There was always at least one Cabinet officer in our group of cavaliers.
Our longest expedition was to the little town of San Cristoval, five hours distant from the capital. We started at four in the morning by bright moonlight and rode through the sleeping town. At the city gate a sentinel challenged:
“Who goes there?”