there is more in the Spanish words than can well be
brought out in a translation, for the reason that _vivero_ means a
vessel in which fish are brought from the Yucatan banks _alive_, in
large salt-water tanks. We had been accusing the Spaniards of cruelty
and barbarity in their treatment of the insurgents. The artist "gets
back at us," to use a slang phrase, by exclaiming, in pretended horror,
"What barbarous cruelty! They have captured a boat-load of _living_
fish!"

For a Spanish soldier, that is not bad; and the touch is as delicate in
the sneer of the legend as in the technic of the cartoon.

A little farther along and higher up, on the same wall, was a carefully
executed and beautifully finished life-sized portrait of a tonsured
Roman Catholic monk--a sketch that I should have been glad to frame and
hang in my library, if it had only been possible to get it off the wall
without breaking the plaster upon which it had been drawn. I thought of
trying to photograph it; but the light in the chamber was not strong
enough for a snap shot, and I had no tripod to support my camera during
a time-exposure.

There were several other sketches and caricatures on the left-hand wall;
but none of them was as good as were the two that I have described, and,
after examining them all carefully, I cast my eyes about the room to see
what I could find in the shape of "loot" that would be worth carrying
away as a memento of the place. Apart from old shoes, a modern
kerosene-lamp of glass, a dirty blanket or two, and a cot-bed, there
seemed to be nothing worth confiscating except a couple of Spanish
newspapers hanging against the right-hand wall on a nail. One was "El
Imparcial," a sheet as large as the New York "Sun"; and the other, "La
Saeta," an illustrated comic paper about the size of "Punch." They had
no intrinsic value, of course, and as "relics" they were not
particularly characteristic; but "newspapers from a bastion in Morro
Castle" would be interesting, I thought, to some of my journalistic
friends at home, so I decided to take them. I put up my hand to lift
them off the nail without tearing them, and was amazed to discover that
neither nail nor newspapers had any tangible existence. They had been
drawn on the plaster, by that confounded soldier-artist, with a
lead-pencil I felt worse deceived and more chagrined than the Greek pony
that neighed at the painted horse of Apelles! But I need not have felt
so humiliated. Those ne