broken and fallen into the pool, leaving big gaps, through which rise
day and night deadly stenches and poisonous exhalations from the pool
below.

The people above it are not ignorant of their situation. They know that
they are living over a death-trap, but there is no other place for
them. Bands of guerrillas and flying columns have driven them in like
sheep to this city, and, with no money and no chance to obtain work,
they have taken shelter in the only place that is left open to them.

With planks and blankets and bits of old sheet iron they have, for the
sake of decency, put up barriers across these abandoned warehouses, and
there they are now sitting on the floor or stretched on heaps of rags,
gaunt and hollow-eyed. Outside, in the angles of the fallen walls, and
among the refuse of the warehouses, they have built fireplaces, and,
with the few pots and kettles they use in common, they cook what food
the children can find or beg.

One gentleman of Cardenas told me that a hundred of these people called
at his house every day for a bit of food.

Old negroes and little white children, some of them as beautiful, in
spite of their rags, as any children I ever saw, act as providers for
this hapless colony. They beg the food and gather the sticks and do the
cooking. Inside the old women and young mothers sit on the rotten
planks listless and silent, staring ahead of them at nothing.

I saw the survivors of the Johnstown flood when the horror of that
disaster was still plainly written in their eyes, but destitute as they
were of home and food and clothing, they were in better plight than