tance ahead, the mules were finally extricated, and
the procession moved on.

Six or eight miles from Siboney we passed a solitary, and of course
empty, house, standing back a little from the road, in a farm-like
opening, or clearing. This house, Mr. Elwell informed me, was Sevilla. I
had supposed, before I left the ship, that Guasimas and Sevilla were
villages--as, indeed, they are represented to be on all the Spanish maps
of the country. But I soon learned not to put my trust in Spanish maps.
Most of them have not been revised or corrected in half a century, and
they were full of errors in the first place. There is not a village, nor
a hamlet, on this whole road from Siboney to Santiago; and the only two
houses I saw had been abandoned for weeks, if not months. The road runs,
almost everywhere, through a tangled, tropical wilderness; and if there
ever were any villages on it, they have long since disappeared.

The Sevilla house seems to stand on or near the crest of the highest
ridge that the road crosses; and a short distance beyond it, through an
opening in the trees, we caught sight, suddenly and unexpectedly, of the
city of Santiago itself--a long, ragged line of pink barracks, thatched
houses, church steeples, and wide-spreading trees, standing upon a low
hill on the other side of what looked like a green, slightly rolling
meadow, which was five or six hundred feet below the position that we
occupied, and perhaps three miles away. This meadow, as I subsequently
ascertained, was itself made up of hills, among them El Pozo and the
high, bare ridge of San Juan; but from our elevated point of view the
hills and valleys seemed to blend into a gently rolling and slightly
inclined plain, which was diversified, here and there, by patches of
chaparral or clumps of royal palm, but which presented, apparently, no
obstacles at all to the advance of an attacking force. I could not
discover anything that looked like a fort or an extensive earthwork; but
I counted sixteen Red Cross flags flying over large buildings on the
side of the city next to us, and with the aid of a good field-glass I
could just see, in front of the long pink barrack, or hospital, two or
three faint brown lines which might possibly be embankments or lines of
rifle-pits. The houses on the El Pozo and San Juan heights ought to have
been well within the limits of vision from that point of view, but, as I
did not notice them, I presume they were hidden by the