hout springs, and to me it seemed as if we
must leave the rails at any moment.

In Havana we regarded Don Andrez as a good fellow, but upon our arrival
at San Felipe he had grown into a man of importance. When we came to
Cajio he had grown into a person of distinction, and at the island he
had swollen into a local Caesar. At San Felipe, a mere hamlet, horses
were waiting for us and mules for the baggage, but before setting out we
went to a nearby hacienda and sat down to what was simply the best lunch
of which I ever partook.

The town was chiefly remarkable for the number of its fighting cocks. At
the hacienda there were dozens, each in its separate
compartment--regarded the same as horses and game dogs are in England
and America--and half the black boys we met were carrying game birds.

At last, starting for Cajio, the road soon degenerated into a mere
track, which led through some barren hills with scanty growths of a
species of oak without underbrush, and here and there a sprinkling of
cacti, and in the lower reaches between the hills grew dense green walls
of Spanish bayonet.

We were crossing Cuba at its narrowest part, and from San Felipe to
Cajio was only some thirty miles. After fifteen miles we came into the
fertile coast belt and passed a number of deserted sugar plantations
where tropic vegetation was trying to cover up the work of ruin wrought
by man. Residences and sugar houses destroyed by fire were very much in
evidence. To my surprise I learned that bodies of insurgents--who then
held and had held for six years nearly the entire eastern province of
Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Principe, and part of the extreme western
province of Pinar del Rio--had only a few weeks before landed by night
at the port La Playa de Batabano, fifteen miles away, and with the cry
of "Free Cuba and death to the Spaniard!" had blotted out the town and
then marched into the heart of the country, burning houses, killing the
whites and calling upon the slaves to join them in freeing Cuba. Many
did, and terrible were their excesses, and terribly did they pay for
these. The Spanish soldiers and loyal Cuban volunteers closed in upon
them, and at the little hamlet of San Marcos, where we halted and
examined the too evident signs of the battle and massacre that followed,
they made their last stand, but were no match for their well-armed and
disciplined foes. After a desperate struggle they were overpowered, and
every surviving soul