le-looking, and impressive to the eye
and the imagination, but the horizontal reddish streaks of freshly
turned earth along the crests of the hills east and west of it had ten
times its offensive power. I saw the last Spanish soldier leave the
castle at noon on Sunday, and when we passed it, soon after four
o'clock, its flag was gone, its walls were deserted, and buzzards were
soaring in circles about its little corner turrets.

About one hundred and fifty yards inside the entrance to the harbor we
passed the wreck of the _Reina Mercedes_, lying close to the shore, on
the right-hand side of the channel, with her port rail under water and
her masts sloping at an angle of forty-five degrees to the westward. Two
brass-bound sea-chests and a pile of signal-flags were lying on her deck
aft, and she had not been touched, apparently, since she was sunk by the
guns of our battle-ships on the night of July 4.

Three hundred or three hundred and fifty yards farther in we passed what
the sailors of the fleet call "Hobson's choice," the steam-collier
_Merrimac_. She lay in deep water, about midway from shore to shore, and
all that could be seen of her were the tops of her masts and about two
feet of her smoke-stack. If the channel were narrow and were in the
middle of the passage, she would have blocked it completely; but
apparently it is wider than her length, and vessels drawing twenty feet
or more of water could go around her without touching bottom. It is a
little remarkable that both combatants should have tried to obstruct
this channel and that neither should have succeeded. The location chosen
by the Spaniards seemed to me to be a better one than that selected by
Hobson; but it is so near the mouth of the harbor that the chance of
reaching it with a vessel in the glare of our search-lights and under
the fire of our guns was a very slight one. The _Reina Mercedes_ reached
it, but was disabled before she could get into position.[5]

Beyond the _Merrimac_ the entrance to the harbor widens a little, but
the shores continue high and steep for a distance of a mile or more. At
intervals of a few hundred yards, however, beautiful deep coves run back
into the high land on either side, and at the head of every one the eye
catches a glimpse of a little settlement of half a dozen houses with
red-tiled roofs, or a country villa shaded by palms and half hidden in
shrubbery and flowers. One does not often see, in the tropics or
elsewhere