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18 EVERYDAY LIFE IN HAVANA DURING THE WAR SCARE A CITY OF PLEASURE LOVERS WHO ATTEND BULL FIGHTS WITH HALF A MILLION DEAD OR MISSING AND DANCE AND GAMBLE IN THE FACE OF DEATH. No City in the World Is Just Now So Much in the American Eye as Havana, in Whose Harbor Our Noble Battle-Ship Was Blown Up Last Week. Here Is a Vivid Picture of Life in the Cuban Capital as It Is To-day. • • THIS sport Is purely Spanish. We Cubans do not enjoy It, and who knows that before long it may be prohibited by an act of Con- gress?" The speaker was a hand- j lome man, -with a strong, thoughtful lace, as he looked down into the bull ring in Havana several Sundays ago. Mazzintlni, Spain's great toreador, had just brought a magnificent Mexican bull j to his knees by a quick, daring thrust. ; The thousands of spectators who lined the amphitheater, tier upon tier, were applauding frantically. Hats were be ing shied, into the ring with reckless generosity, only to be disdainfully thrown back to the seats and scrambled for by the owners. It was not such a crowd as one sees j In Madrid or Seville. As the first speak- j er remarked, bull fighting, or bull butchering, is not a Cuban sport; it is essentially Spanish, and above every thing- Spanish in Havana now hangs the dread of Americans and their Con •■gress'. ■ Cubans love baseball. They do ,' not play ii now, because, silly as it may seem, AYeyler forbade the game. This only makes them love it all tha more, Bays the correspondent of the New York Herald. All through the eager, excited crowd on that Sunday afternoon sat sad-eyed boys in the uniform of Spain, with their Mauser rifles over their knees. Next to, the president's box lolled half a doz en officers high in command. It had been rumored in Havana that there was to be another popular outcry against autonomy, and the sad-eyed boy soldiers were there with their Mau- eer Titles to see to it that the dignity of the latest Spanish experiment for holding the island was not insulted. Poor autonomist ministers! They might be hanged by the insurgents if they •went -into the bushes to- talk "autono my," and it takes Mauser rifles to en force respect for them in the bull ring of Havana. The last bull is butchered and the crowd riles peacefully out of the ring and starts on a trot for the ferryboat that runs across the bay, There was no outcry, and Havana's narrow streets swallow up its bull n'trhtlng po-p uiatir.n only to disgorge it on the prom enades of the Central Park when the tights are lit and the military band plays inspiring martial airs. Around and around the park the crowds stroll, smoking strong cigarettes or occasion ally breaking ranks to eat ice cream at one nt the numerous cafes. All Havana eats ice cream. They make it of the most unheard-of fruits and eat It with delicate little sugar wafers. The stroll is over by 11, and then the city is wrapped in ita nerv ous, fitful sleep. Away in the hills. Within .uunshot of the city, lie the lynx eyed insurgents, watching the lights of the city as they darken in the streets ami theaters; watching for an oppor tunity to steal into the suburbs and dash back into the bushes with qui nine or cartridges. Nrght after night the same scene is witm-ssr-d; occasionally a train of cars is blown up with dynamite and shots are fired into the disabled train, but Havana has ceased to be even dis turbed by these events. An obscure paragraph in a local paper gives mea ger details, and the incident is dropped. It is truly astonishing how aecus *»xned one becomes even to the, most tragic affairs of life. In Cuba people are dying by hundreds.: The Arch bishop of Havana has said that his parish registers show over 500,000 missing since the war began.- Almost every woman in the street wears deep mourning; plantations are burned and devastated; the tramp of armed men and the rattle 'of gun carriages awaken all from morning slumbers; food Is scarce and becoming scarcer: the bare pecessities of life are dear and becoming deafer; yet the music and the dance go on. There is money to gamble at the clubs and pennies for the poor to risk in lottery schemes. Spain has spent £56,000,0.00 to put down the rebellion; her representa tives are pent up in Havana; yet- the national pastime — the bull fight — goes on every Sunday as if there were no hungry, fiercely determined men in the hills. In fact, people are tired talking war; in society they talk of something else unless some novel incident oc curs. Widows and mothers seem to have drained their dregs of sorrow, and go about sad eyed, but composed, as if their grief were too deep for tears. At Key West I saw the father of Qeneral Aranguren. He is an old man, with an iron face and piercing eye. Ho ?eems to live in a dazed past. Every night he is about the village postoffice awaiting news of anything or anybody. Occasionally a phantom of the past in the shape of dome old friend comes before his eyes and he breaks into boyish ecstasy. He has one son under the sod and an other "In the bushes," as they say in Cuba. He doesn't expect to see the second one again, so he dreams on and plans to tell the story of his con's death to the world. What is left of Cuban society -wraps ] itself in exclusiveness and awaits its j time. The wealthy land owners at the beginning of the war sought re fuge in Europe or the United States. Most of them ha< no thought of re duced incomes. Then came burned i fields and impoverished tenants; edicts I of the Government forbidding th<; J foreclosure of mortgages, but . always ; taxes more and more. Incomes wore ; reduced, many stopped. In order to protect what they had, many once J rich returned to Havana with scarce- j ly enough to buy the coarser necessi- i ties of life. But it is still an ex- I elusive aristocracy, as proud as the j first families of ruined Virginia, and, like them, rebel to the bone. There is no doubt about where the native Cuban aristocracy stands in this war. They were never frugal people. On the contrary, the men ; spent money like drunken sailors. Nor were they good business men. The : commercial control of the island passed away from them years ago, and the American, Spaniard, English- \ man and German became their mas ters. Cubans complain of unjust dis- | crimination against them by the Span- ' iards, but where they are pitted i fi gainst each other in the end the Spaniard wins. It is ability that tells in the long run. Years of repression and unjust discrimination have not ruined the Hebrew. Several scions of the old regime were comparing notes on old times one evening in my hear ing. ""Why," said one, "we sometimes < came into Havana with big wagons and drove out to the plantations a whole band of music. We would then invite hundreds of our kinsmen and friends, and keep up a jollification for; two, three ai»l sometimes four weeks." \ THE SAX FRANCISCO CALL, StTSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1893. After that T did not wonder why the frugal Spaniard or thrifty Yankee got the unper hand- in trade. • ; Just at present the most feared man to. American tourists in Havana is Dr. Brunner of the Marine Hospital Corps, stationed in Havana for the" purpose of issuing Health permits, without which no one can land at any of the ports in the States. Dr. Brunner does his duty with strict impartiality; hence his unpopularity in some quarters. It is astonishing how prone we Ameri cans are to evade laws and chuckle in wardly at the performance. When we cannot we are indignant and begin to protest and splutter- about outrages. There was a long line of expectant ap plicants for clean bills of health when I made my application. As an act of kindness to those con templating a visit to Havana it should be stated that every one must be vac cinated. If you go there without this precaution Dr. Brunner will insist upon having it done and will refuse to issue a permit until a reasonable length of time has elapsed to note the effect, us ually twelve days. The first applicants were a smart little bride from Charles ton and her husband on their weddding tour. They had been vaccinated a month before and they were all right. The next applicant was a drummer, who tried to pass on the strawberry mark in the middle of his back. Re sult, the wholesale damnation of the Government, vaccination, medical in spectors and everything in general. "Are these stringent regulations ne cessary?" I asked. "Why, of course they are," replied the doctor. "I do not meddle with the politics of the situation, but I have made up my mind to one thing and that is that annexation would be the great est blessing to the United States from a sanitary point of view. Within the last century the Southern States have lost more money and people by yellow fever and smallpox epidemics, directly trace able to this port, than the whole nation would lose in five wars. If the United States owned the island the city of Ha vana would .be cleaned out, and made as healthful as any place in the world situated in the tropics." This opinion is shared by all the men of any knowledge of modern sani tary methods with whom I talked. The bay of Havana is pinched by two capes at the mouth, and then expands into a large basin. The tide does not ebb and flow sufficiently to carry away the re fuse matter now dumped into it. As a result, the whole bay reeks with foul matter; so filthy is the water that Cap tain Sigsbeee washed the decks of the ill-fated Maine every morning with water brought, from the shcr<». The city itself has only the rudest system of sewers, although the water supply is excellent, and was obtained some years ago at an enormous cost. The best troops in the Spanish ser vice do not belong to the line, but to that admirable corps of military po : lice known as the Orden Publico. This lis a corps d'elito, composed of young ; .soldiers, Spaniards to a man, all of whom have been selected from the ; regular army on account of the superior intelligence and physical qualities. They perform regular po lice patrol duty and do it with a de ', gree of dignity and courtesy that ; might well serve as a model for de ! portment for the Greater New York ! police force. Their uniform is d!s ! tinctly military, consisting of a dark blue tunic faced with red. wide blue i trousers with red stripes, and a jaunty ; cap, something after the fashion of the i French fatigue cap, until recently worn in our army. Ordinarily thtj are armed with a huge revolver, worn on the left side in a buff leather sh< ath, and .1 short, straight sword. They are all admirably set up, and their arms, equipments and uniforms are the very pink of perfection, in striking contrast to the slovenliness and dilapidation of weapons and cloth ing that characterise the Spanish sol dier of the line. All tourists who have had occasion to come into contact with an Order SCIENTISTS TELL US HOW WE THINK AT last scientists seem to be on the point of finding out what happens in the brain when a person thinks. It has long been known that the brain is the thinking organ, but just how the making of thought comes about has been a puzzle. The celebrated Cabanis solved the matter off-hand by saying that the brain secretes thought as the liver se cretes bile. This terse saying passed into common use, but soon came to be recognized as a clever speech rather than an explanation of the mystery. Now, however, the most recent re searches of the microscopists are mak ing it appear that after all the saying is not so far wrong, but that, correctly in terpreted, it in some measure expresses the facts. Of course thought, being in tangible, is not properly to be com pared with bile or any other physical substance, but it appears that the pro cesses In the brain which produce thought, and without which thinking is impossible, are strictly comparable to those changes in the liver and other or gans which produce the tangible secre tions. A committee of British physicians, acting jointly, has for some years been giving particular attention to this topic, and their researches, though not yet al together complete, already show some very interesting results, which, taken together with those of investigators on the continent, let us see a long way into the intricacies of the brain. It has shown unequivocally, for exam ple, that a brain cell, which is the really important part of the brain, actually loses part of its substance during ac tion. The brain cells of persons and of animals that have died during a period of great exhaustion from over-exertion are found to be greatly changed from j the condition of the normal cell during times of health and vigor. The cell of the exhausted brain, instead of being plump and full of nervous matter, is found to be hollowed out of "vacuolat ed," a cavity within Us substance hav i ing formed and being filled with water. | This means that a part of the cell sub i stance has been actually consumed dur i ing the time of brain activity, precisely ' as coal is consumed when one gets heat I from a furnace. It Is found, further, that if an ani i mal whose brain cells are thus ex ] hausted is permitted to rest and to ! sleep its cells rapidly recuperate, new | material being supplied from the blood until the vacuolatlon has disappeard, and the cell is practically as good a3 ■ new again. This explains why sleep is • necessary to our existence. During waking hours our brains are literally ; worn away, and sleep is the state dur x uolico will cheerfully testify to his I unfailing courtesy. It was this corps which, equipped as infantry with Rem- ; ircgtorr rifles, distinguished itself by the ; masterly manner in which it handled the mobs during the riots, without once i having occasion to fire a shot.. Although the evidences of war to be ! seen in Havana are. scanty enough, it! is amazing how frequently the insur- | gents manage to run the guard of the outposts and make rorays into the Buburbs. Hardly a week passes that i ing which the repair shops of the brain make good the damage of the waking hours. Thus the brain of a person who suffers from insomnia is in the condi tion of a locomotive which is run night and day without going to the repair shops; disaster must ultimately result. It is not sleep alone, however, that rests the brain cell, though sleep is ab solutely essential to recuperation of the brain as a whole. But not all parts of the brain are involved in any one kind of mental effort. The blood supply of the brain is so arranged that by expul sion or contraction of different arteries parts of the brain may be flusheu wi.ui blood and other parts dammed off, so to speak, somewhat as .the various cur rents of an irrigated field are regulated by the gardener. And as rapid ilow of blood is essential to great mental ac tivity, this means that one part of the brain may be very actively at work while another part is restinsr and re cuperating. Thus it is that a person suffering from brain fatigue may leave his desk and go out into the fields with a golfstick, or on the highways with a bicycle, and, by diverting his mind, give the over worked cells a chance to rest and re- cuperate. But it must not be overlooked that such exercise involves other brain cells,, which, in turn, become ex hausted, and that, in the end, for the recuperation of the brain as a whole, sleep js absolutely essential. No recre ation, no mediqine, no stimulant will take its place. The man who does not give himself sufficient hours of sleep, or who is unable to sleep when he makes the effort, is literally burning away his brain substance, and can no more keep on indefinitely in this way than a locomotive can run on indefi nitely without getting fresh supplies of fuel. In this new view, it appears that eaoh brain cell is a sort of storage battery, which can perform a certain amount of work and then must be recharged. This likeness to a battery is further emphasized by the fact that the na ture of the brain cell's work consists, like that of any other battery, of the sending out of charges of energy along fibers that may be likened to wires. Brain cells, when examined under the microscope, are found not to be simple globular bodies, like many other kinds of cells. On the contrary, they are irregular in shape, and when prop erly stained, little wire-like fibers can be seen jutting out from them in var ious directions. It is along these fibers that the messages come to the cell, and other messages are sent out, much as messages go and come from a tele phone central office. This likening of the brain to a tele phone central office is a comparison that may be carried to a remarkable length. Indeed, no other comparison Bervea so well to give one a correct a squadron of a dozen or so reckless horsemen does not make a night raid on the little town of Casa Blanca, across the bay, and a scant quarter of a mile from the palace itself. These raids are made half in bravado and half for the purpose of looting the few stores in the place to procure supplies of liquors and provisions, and as a finale, " before retreating across the hills to the westward, the raiders gen erally discharge a few random shots at the city across the bay. notion of the method of brain action. But until recently there was one phase of the matter that could not be ex plained. How is it that the various messages that are surging through the brain are directed to proper channels, among these multitudinous wires? When you call up the central office, you give a certain number, and the "hello girl" connects your particular wire with that number. When you are through talk ing the girl breaks the circuit, and you can no longer communicate along that line. But is there anything simi lar to this making and breaking of cir cuits possible in the brain? Astonishing as it may seem, the an swer is, yes. There is precisely such a series of changes in the circuits of the brain cells as is effected by the "hello girl" with the telephone wires. The manner of it is this. Recent stud ies of the brain cell, particularly those made by the Spanish physiologist, Ra mon Cajal, have shown that many of the wires which lead out from a cell do not go on uninterruptedly to a ter mination in some other distant cell, as they were formerly supposed to do, but instead terminate in "blind ends." That is to say, they point out toward other cells, but do not reach them. Such a fiber clearly cannot convey any mes sage, because, like a telephone wire that has been cut, it does not lead any where. But under certain conditions of stim ulation a very extraordinary thing hap pens. The "blind" fiber, under stim ulus from its central cell, lengthens out until it touches a fiber of a neighboring cell, and, presto! with such contact a circuit is completed and a message flashes between the cells. Manifestly, such coming together of the "blind" fibers is precisely compar able to the "hello girl's" connecting of your telephone with another. And as in the case of the telephones, so in the case of the cells, when the communica tion is completed the connection is broken, the fibers retract and cease to touch one another, and no further mes sages can be sent. Sometimes the telephone girl does not understand your order, or , reports that the number you want is "engaged" and you cannot send your message. Similarly, in the brain, it seems some times as if certain circuits one wishes to use-are engaged in other channels, for how often does one "puzzle his brains" to recall a fact or a name which he feels that he knows perfectly, but which will not come at command? And then how, perhaps hours after afterward, the elusive name will flash before him as if the telephone girl of his brain cell had at -last succeeded in getting the right connfc«rtlon? When one reflects that each of these wonderful brain cells is microscopic in size, requiring, indeed, a high power of the micro-scope to make it visible. General Lee's breakfast to the offi cers of the Maine, at the Marianao Yacht Club, on January 30, served aa a pretext for a raid by the insurgents, who were anxious to give the Ameri can visitors an example of their prow ess. Word had been sent to the nearest insurgent camp that the break fast was to take place, and arrange ments were made for a foray, under Juan Delgado, to attack the town as a sort of spectacular finale to the enter tainment at the club. and that there are billions of them In a cubic inch of brain substance, one is led to wonder that such mistakes of connection, or failures to connect, do not occur oftener. As it is, the tele phone office of the brain is easily the most wonderful structure of which we have any knowledge. The most deli cate piece of mechanism ever devised by human hands is a crude thing in deed compared with the marvelous brain cell. In time of war It often happens that an invading army will cut the tele graph wires and destroy instruments and batteries at the central offices, go that telegraphic and telephonic com munication becomes Impossible. A pre cisely similar destruction of the brain fibers and brain cells occurs under cer tain conditions of disease. The familiar disease paresis, for ex ample, consists essentially of just such a destruction of the brain structures as this. Day by day, in the paretic's brain, disease is making inroads upon the delicate mechanism of the cella, and correspondingly, the ideas that could alone result from the activities of those Gells are annulled forever. When such destruction has gone far. involving many sets of cells, it is as impossible that the paretic's min<i should act normally, as that a tele phone system should operate with linea cut and batteries destroyed. It will doubtless surprise many to learn that the dealers in human hair do not depend on chance clippings here and there, but there is a regular hair harvest that can always be relied upon. It is estimated that over 11,000 pounds of human hair is used annually in the civilized world for adorning the heads of men and women, but principally the fair sex. The largest supply of hair comes from Switzerland, Germany and the French provinces. There is a hu man hair market in the department of the Lower Pyrenees, held every Fri day. Hundreds of hair traders walk up and down the one street of the village, their shears dangling from their belts, and inspect the braids which the peas ant girls, standing on the steps of the houses, let down for inspection. If a bargain is struck the hair is cut and the money paid on the spot. Few words have a more curious def inition than "bachelor." Originally i A meant students who had taken their degree. Successful students were crowned with laurel berries, the Latin for which is baccalaureus. These stu dents were not allowed to marry, for fear the duties of husband and father should Interfere with their literary pur suits. So finally "baccalaureate" or "bachelor" sot its Dresent significant