As its white-curtained, glazed doors expanded, emitting a little puff of his own cigarette smoke, it was like the bursting of catalpa blossoms, and the exiles came like bees, pushing into the tiny room to sip its rich variety of tropical sirups, its lemonades, its orangeades, its orgeats, its barley-waters, and its outlandish wines, while they talked of dear home--that is to say, of Barbadoes, of Martinique, of San Domingo, and of Cuba.
There were Pedro and Benigno, and Fernandez and Francisco, and Benito.
Benito was a tall, swarthy man, with immense gray moustachios, and hair as harsh as tropical grass and gray as ashes.

When he could spare his cigarette from his lips, he would tell you in a cavernous voice, and with a wrinkled smile that he was "a-t-thorty-seveng." There was Martinez of San Domingo, yellow as a canary, always sitting with one leg curled under him and holding the back of his head in his knitted fingers against the back of his rocking-chair.

Father, mother, brother, sisters, all, had been massacred in the struggle of '21 and '22; he alone was left to tell the tale, and told it often, with that strange, infantile insensibility to the solemnity of his bereavement so peculiar to Latin people.
But, besides these, and many who need no mention, there were two in particular, around whom all the story of the Cafe des Exiles, of old M.
D'Hemecourt and of Pauline, turns as on a double centre.

First, Manuel Mazaro, whose small, restless eyes were as black and bright as those of a mouse, whose light talk became his dark girlish face, and whose redundant locks curled so prettily and so wonderfully black under the fine white brim of his jaunty Panama.

He had the hands of a woman, save that the nails were stained with the smoke of cigarettes.