balcony. The town runs down a slope to the bay and in the
middle of it is the Plaza with me on the balcony which lets out of my
sleeping room-- "the room" so the proprietor tells me, "reserved only
for the Capitain General." It is just like the description in that
remarkable novel of mine where Clay and Alice sit on the balcony of the
restaurant. I have the moonlight and the Cathedral with the open doors
and the bronze statue in the middle and the royal palms moving in the
breeze straight from the sea and the people walking around the plaza
below. If it was in any way as beautiful as this Clay and Alice would
have ended the novel that night.

I got a grand lot of letters to-day which Otto, my interpreter brought
back from Havana after having conducted Remington there in safety. I
must say you are writing very cheerfully now, but I don't wonder you
worried at first but now that I am a commercial traveller with an order
from Weyler which does everything when I find it necessary, you really
must not worry any more but just let me continue on my uneventful
journey and then come home. I shall have been gone so long and my
friends, judging from Russell and Dana and Irene's letters, will be so
glad to see me, that they will have forgotten I went out to do other
things than coast around in trains. As a matter of fact this is a
terribly big problem and most difficult to get the truth of, I find
myself growing to be the opposite of the alarmist, whatever that is,
although you would think the picturesque and dramatic and exciting
thing would be the one I would rather believe because I want to believe
it, but I find that that is not so, I see a great deal on both sides
and I do not believe half I am told. As we used to say at college, "it
is against history," and it is against history for men to act as I am
told they are acting here-- They show me the pueblo huddled together
around the fortified towns, living in palm huts but I know that they
have always lived in palm huts, the yellow kid reporters don't know
that or consider it, but send off word that the condition of the people
is terrible, that they have only leaves to cover them, and it sounds
very badly. That is an instance of what I mean. In a big way there is
no doubt that the process going on here is one of extermination and
ruin. Two years ago the amount of sugar shipped from the port of
Matanzas to the U. S. was valued at 11 millions a year. This last year
ju