it to be a man, when a scrap of writing is worth more!

It is a fact which, perhaps, may not be wholly unworthy of notice that,
among the sketches I saw and the mural inscriptions I copied in all
parts of Morro Castle, there was not an indecent picture nor an improper
word, sentence, or line. Spanish soldiers may be cruel, but they do not
appear to be vicious or corrupt in the way that soldiers often are.

In wandering through the corridors and gloomy chambers of the castle,
copying inscriptions on walls and cannon, and exploring out-of-the-way
nooks and corners, I spent a large part of the day. I found that the
masonry of the fortress had suffered even less from the guns of Admiral
Sampson's fleet than I had supposed. The eastern and southeastern faces
of the upper cube had been damaged a little; the parapet, or battlement,
of the gun-floor had been shattered in one place, and the debris from it
had fallen over and partly blocked up the steps leading to that floor
from the second story; two or three of the corner turrets had been
injured by small shells; and there was a deep scar, or circular pit, in
the face of the eastern wall, over the moat, where the masonry had been
struck squarely by a heavy projectile; but, with the exception of these
comparatively trifling injuries, the old fortress remained intact.
Newspaper men described it as "in ruins" or "almost destroyed" half a
dozen times in the course of the summer; and the correspondent of a
prominent metropolitan journal, who entered the harbor on his
despatch-boat just behind the _State of Texas_ the day that Santiago
surrendered, did not hesitate to say: "The old fort is a mass of ruins.
The stone foundation has been weakened by the shells from the fleet,
causing a portion of the castle to settle from ten to twenty feet. Only
the walls on the inner side remain. The terraces have been obliterated
and the guns dismounted and buried in the debris. There are great
crevices in the supporting walls, and the fort is in a general state of
collapse."

How any intelligent man, with eyes and a field-glass, could get such an
erroneous impression, or make such wild and reckless statements, I am
utterly unable to imagine. As a matter of fact, the fleet never tried or
intended to injure the castle, and all the damage done to it was
probably accidental. I have no doubt that Admiral Sampson might have
reduced the fortress to the condition that the correspondent so
graphically des