ll here relate an incident which did not come under
my personal observation, but which was told of by my ordinarily
veracious friend, Colonel Maginniss. At one time during the winter,
Colonel Maginniss and his assistants had for three days, been searching
for a company horse that was lost, when a man named Ramsden came to the
colonel's tent and reported that there was a horse hanging in the woods
not far away. The colonel and Mr. Jones went to the spot and found a
large white horse, that had weighed twelve hundred pounds, dead in the
thicket, hanging by the neck. No formal inquest was held, but it was the
colonel's theory that this American-born horse could not live on Cuban
grass, and had deliberately hanged himself. A somewhat similar case I
was personally cognizant of. A sick horse was reported drowning in a
shallow pond near the camp. Colonel Maginniss went to the scene on a
Cuban pony, with a dozen colonists, and after a hard struggle the horse
was dragged one hundred yards away from the mud and water, and left on
dry land. Early the next morning it was discovered that the horse had
worked his way back into the pond and drowned himself. Was this a case
of animal suicide? It may be said that none of the colonists ever
resorted to this desperate expedient, even when the sugar gave out.

Colonel Maginniss was "a master hand in sickness." An English woman who
came to the colony was very ill, and blood poisoning set in. The
colonel's experience as a family man was now of service. He had the
woman removed to a large tent, attended her personally and looked after
the children, calling four or five times daily, and administering such
remedies as he had. The woman recovered, and gratefully expressed the
belief that the colonel had saved her life.

Near the end of April there was a sudden and surprising rise of water
along Central avenue between La Gloria and the port. One afternoon Mr.
Lowell and his men at work upon the road noticed that the water was
rising in the creeks and ditches along the way. This was a surprising
discovery, inasmuch as there had been no rain of any account. The water
continued to rise rapidly, and when the men left off work late in the
afternoon it was several feet higher than it had been at noon. It came
up steadily through the night, so that pedestrians to the port the next
morning found the water even with the new road all along and over it
where the creeks came in. Further down toward the port,