[Illustration: One of the Block Houses-From a photograph taken by Mr.
Davis]

With the soldiers, and crowding them for space, were the officers'
mules and ponies, steers, calves and squealing pigs, while crates full
of chickens were piled on top of one another as high as the hurricane
deck, so that the roosters and the buglers vied with each other in
continual contests. It was like traveling with a floating menagerie.
Twice a day the bugles sounded the call for breakfast and dinner, and
the soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on the deck around square
tin cans filled with soup or red wine, from which they fed themselves
with spoons and into which they dipped their rations of hard tack,
after first breaking them on the deck with a blow from a bayonet or
crushing them with a rifle butt.

The steward brought what was supposed to be a sample of this soup to
the officer seated in the pilot house high above the squalor, and he
would pick out a bean from the mess on the end of a fork and place it
to his lips and nod his head gravely, and the grinning steward would
carry the dish away.

But the soldiers seemed to enjoy it very much, and to be content, even
cheerful. There are many things to admire about the Spanish Tommy. In
the seven fortified cities which I visited, where there were thousands
of him, I never saw one drunk or aggressive, which is much more than
you can say of his officers. On the march he is patient, eager and
alert. He trudges from fifteen to thirty miles a day over the worst
roads ever constructed by man, in canvas shoes with rope soles,
carrying one hundred and fifty cartridges, fifty across his stomach and