cribes,--I saw him destroy the stone fort of Aguadores in
a few hours, with only three ships,--but he discovered, almost as soon
as he reached Santiago, that the old castle was perfectly harmless, and,
with the cool self-restraint of a thoughtful and level-headed naval
officer, he determined to save it as a picturesque and interesting relic
of the past. Most of the projectiles that struck it were aimed at the
eastern battery, the lighthouse, or the barracks on the crest of the
bluff behind it; and all the damage accidentally done to it by these
shots might easily be repaired in two or three days. If Cuba ever
becomes a part of the United States, the people of this country will owe
a debt of gratitude to Admiral Sampson for resisting the temptation to
show what his guns could do, and for preserving almost intact one of the
most interesting and striking old castles in the world.

Leaving the fortress through the eastern gateway and crossing the dry
moat on a wooden trestle which had taken the place of the drawbridge, I
walked along the crest of the bluff toward the eastern battery. It was
evident, from the appearance of the lighthouse and the one-story,
tile-roofed buildings on the crest of the hill, that if Morro Castle
escaped serious injury it was not because the gunners of our fleet were
unable to hit it. Every other structure in its vicinity had been
shattered, riddled, or smashed. The lighthouse, which was a tapering
cylinder of three-quarter-inch iron twelve feet in diameter at the base
and perhaps thirty feet high, had been struck at least twenty or thirty
times. The western half of it, from top to bottom, had been carried away
bodily; there were eleven shot-holes in the other half; the lantern had
been completely demolished; and the ground everywhere in the vicinity
was strewn with fragments of iron and glass. The flagstaff of the
signal-station had been struck twice, slender and difficult to hit as it
was, and the walls and roofs of the barracks and ammunition storehouses
had been pierced and torn by shot and shell in a dozen different places.
It is not likely, of course, that all this damage was done at any one
time or in any single bombardment. The gunners of our fleet probably
used these buildings as targets, and fired at them, every time they got
a chance, just for amusement and practice. The white cylinder of the
lighthouse made a particularly good mark, and the eleven shot-holes in
the half of it that remai