fornia and finally Texas, but it lost
six thousand good men, the cost of the war, and all told, in
negotiations, about thirty million dollars, besides. However, it is
not always profitable to look up the harvests of war. There are always
two--the harvest of gain, and the harvest of loss. Death and debt are
reapers, as well as are honor and extent of territory.

The feelings of the six thousand American troops who landed on Cuban
soil on June 22nd, 1898, may well be imagined. Although they felt the
effects of the confinement to which they had been subjected while on
shipboard, there was very little sickness among them. Again possessed
of the free use of their limbs they swarmed the beach and open space
near the landing, making themselves at home, and confronting the
difficulties and perils that lay before them with a courage born of
national pride. Before them were the mountains with their almost
impassable roads, the jungles filled with poisonous plants and the
terrible prickly underbrush and pointed grass, in which skulked the
land crab and various reptiles whose bite or sting was dangerous;
twenty miles of this inhospitable country lay between them and
Santiago, their true objective. And somewhere on the road to that city
they knew they were destined to meet a well-trained foe, skilled in
all the arts of modern warfare, who would contest their advance. The
prospect, however, did not unnerve them, although they could well
conjecture that all who landed would not re-embark. Some in that six
thousand were destined never again to set foot on shipboard. Out of
the Twenty-fifth Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry men were to fall both
before Spanish bullets and disease ere these organizations should
assemble to return to their native shores. These thoughts did not
prevent the men from taking advantage of what nature had to offer
them.

"We landed in rowboats, amid, and after the cessation of the
bombardment of the little hamlet and coast by the men-of-war and
battle-ships," writes a brave soldier of the Twenty-fifth Infantry,
and adds immediately: "We then helped ourselves to cocoanuts which we
found in abundance near the landing." Ordinarily this statement, so
trivial and apparently unimportant, would not merit repetition, but in
its connection here it is significant as showing the immediate
tendency of the men to resort to the fruits of the country, despite
all warnings to the contrary. The two weeks' experience on board the