it through the Spanish lines.

But because a Jacksonville correspondent has invented the tale of one
butchery, it is no reason why the people in the United States should
dismiss all the others as sensational fictions. After I went to Cuba I
refused for weeks to listen to tales of butcheries, because I did not
believe in them and because there seemed to be no way of verifying
them--those who had been butchered could not testify and their
relatives were too fearful of the vengeance of the Spaniards to talk
about what had befallen a brother or a father. But towards the end of
my visit I went to Sagua la Grande and there met a number of Americans
and Englishmen, concerning whose veracity there could be no question.
What had happened to their friends and the laborers on their
plantations was exactly what had happened and is happening to-day to
other pacificos all over the island.

Sagua la Grande is probably no worse a city than others in Cuba, but it
has been rendered notorious by the presence in that city of the
guerrilla chieftain, Benito Cerreros.

Early in last December _Leslie's Illustrated Weekly_ published
half-tone reproductions of two photographs which were taken in Sagua.
One was a picture of the bodies of six Cuban pacificos lying on their
backs, with their arms and legs bound and their bodies showing
mutilation by machetes, and their faces pounded and hacked out of
resemblance to anything human. The other picture was of a group of
Spanish guerrillas surrounding their leader, a little man with a heavy
mustache. His face was quite as inhuman as the face of any of the dead
men he had mutilated. It wore a satisfied smile of fatuous vanity, and
of the most diabolical cruelty. No artist could have drawn a face from