mail, and sometimes when he was digging potatoes or cutting sugar cane
within sight of the forts. Passes and orders were of no avail. The
guerrillas tore up the passes, and swore later that the men were
suspects, and were at the moment of their capture carrying messages to
the insurgents. The stories these planters told me were not dragged
from them to furnish copy for a newspaper, but came out in the course
of our talk, as we walked over the small extent which the forts allowed
us.

My host would say, pointing to one of the pacificos huddled in a corner
of his machine shop: "That man's brother was killed last week about
three hundred yards over there to the left while he was digging in the
field." Or, in answer to a question from our consul, he would say: "Oh,
that boy who used to take care of your horse--some guerrillas shot him
a month ago." After you hear stories like these during an entire day,
the air seems to be heavy with murder, and the very ground on which you
walk smells of blood. It was the same in the town, where any one was
free to visit the _cartel_, and view the murdered bodies of the
pacificos hacked and beaten and stretched out as a warning, or for
public approbation. There were six so exposed while I was in Sagua. In
Matanzas they brought the bodies to the Plaza at night when the band
was playing, and the guerrillas marched around the open place with the
bodies of eighteen Cubans swinging from the backs of ponies with their
heads hanging down and bumping against the horses' knees. The people
flocked to the sides of the Plaza to applaud this ghastly procession,
and the men in the open cafes cheered the guerrilla chief and cried,
"Long live Spain!"

Speaking dispassionately, and with a full knowledge of the details of
many butcheries, it is impossible for me to think of the Spanish