a fresh white-linen
shirt, and a high, stiffly starched, standing collar.

"Good heavens, doctor!" I exclaimed, as he made his appearance in this
Fifth Avenue costume. "Where do you think you are going? To church?"

"No," replied the doctor, imperturbably; "to the front."

"In that dress?"

"Certainly; what's the matter with it?"

"Oh, nothing in particular. As a dress it is a very good dress, and
reflects credit on your tailor; but for a tramp of ten or fifteen miles
over a muddy trail and through a tropical jungle, wouldn't a neat,
simple undershirt, with canvas trousers and a pair of waterproof
leggings, be better? Your starched collar, in this heat, won't last ten
minutes."

The doctor demurred, and protested that the clothes he was wearing were
the oldest he had; but I finally persuaded him to take off his waistcoat
and collar, tie a handkerchief around his neck, and put on a pair of my
leggings; and in this slightly modified costume he went ashore with us
for a march to the camp of the Rough Riders.

About fifteen hundred Cubans, of General Garcia's command, had been
brought to Siboney the day before on one of our transports; and
although most of them had started for the front, several hundred were
still roaming through the village, or standing here and there in groups
on the beach. They did not, at first sight, impress me very favorably.
Fully four fifths of them were mulattoes or blacks; the number of
half-grown boys was very large; there was hardly a suggestion of a
uniform in the whole command; most of the men were barefooted, and their
coarse, drooping straw hats, cotton shirts, and loose, flapping cotton
trousers had been torn by thorny bushes and stained with Cuban mud until
they looked worse than the clothes that a New England farmer hangs on a
couple of crossed sticks in his corn-field to scare away the crows. If
their rifles and cartridge-belts had been taken away from them they
would have looked like a horde of dirty Cuban beggars and ragamuffins on
the tramp. I do not mean to say, or even to suggest, that these
ragamuffins were not brave men and good soldiers. They may have been
both, in spite of their disreputable appearance. When, for months
together, a man has lived the life of an outlaw in the woods, scrambling
through tropical jungles, wading marshy rivers, and sleeping, without
tent or blankets, on the ground, he cannot be expected to look like a
veteran of the regular army on dress-parad