Key West.

Manawatu Herald, 21 June 1898, Page 2

Key West.

It looks like a village in Norway dropped a few thoosand miles down the map of the Globe. There is scarcely a briok or stone building in the town. Low match board houses with timber balconies and verandahs, line the half-dozen little streets There are 20,000 people in the is. land, mostly dirty ; 60 per cent are negroes, another 25 par cent Cubans and the. Spanish langaage in the streets rivals that variety of the English tongue which is jpoken in the United States. Key west has got so far as a tramway, on which ran — or more often stand still — cars hardly better than an oridinary London omnibuß, drawn by depressed and fly blown mules. Also it has its newspaper, printed in English and Spani-h, which engineers daily Cuban boms and war scares with creditable energy. But otherwise Key West is too near the sun and the Latin races not to take things easily. There is hardly a shop window in the place, and not a shop above the level of a village store : there is not a decent restaurant or place of entertainment, or a flagged, walk, or a well-kept house; and;!, there would not be a decent hotel if the company which is running Florida had not set up one to accommodate its clients on their trips from the east to the west coast and to Havana, when Havana again becomes a land of trippers. But there is the lightest of blue nnsulied skies overhead, and a glorious tropical sun. whose blazes is tempered by a - delicious sea-breeze, soft and cool and refreshing ; and there are cocoanut palms* and bananas, and poinsettias growing in the shabby little front gardens of the shabby little houses, and wherever you tarn glimpses of a wavelesa translucent Southern sea.