shows that the means adopted by the Red Cross
to relieve distress in Key West were intelligent and businesslike.

On the day after our arrival Mr. Cobb, of Miss Barton's staff, called at
the hotel to tell us that the Red Cross relief-boats were about to make
another visit to the Spanish prizes in the harbor, and to ask us if we
would like to go with them and see the work.

In half an hour Miss Barton and her staff, Mrs. Kennan and I, started in
the steam-launch of the monitor _Puritan_ to make the round of the
captured Spanish ships, towing behind us two large boats loaded with
assorted stores for the destitute crews. The first vessel we visited was
a small black brigantine from Barcelona, named _Frascito_, which had
been captured eight miles off Havana by the United States cruiser
_Montgomery_. The swarthy, scantily clad Spanish sailors crowded to the
bulwarks with beaming faces as we approached, and the hurried, almost
frenzied eagerness with which they threw us a line, hung a ladder over
the side, and helped us on board, showed that although we were
incidentally Americans, and therefore enemies, we were primarily Red
Cross people, and consequently friends to be greeted and welcomed with
every possible manifestation of respect, gratitude, and affection.

The interior of the little brigantine presented an appearance of
slovenly but picturesque dirt, confusion, and disorder, as if the crew,
overwhelmed by the misfortune that had come upon them, had abandoned the
routine of daily duty and given themselves up to apathy and despair. The
main-deck, between the low after-cabin and the high forecastle, had not
been washed down, apparently, in a week; piles of dirty dishes and
cooking-utensils of strange, unfamiliar shapes lay here and there around
the little galley forward; coils of running rigging were kicking about
under-foot instead of hanging on the belaying-pins; a pig-pen, which had
apparently gone adrift in a gale, blocked up the gangway to the
forecastle on the port side between the high bulwark and a big boat
which had been lashed in V-shaped supports amidships; and a large part
of the space between the cabin and the forecastle on the starboard side
was a chaos of chain-cable, lumber, spare spars, pots, pans, earthen
water-jars, and chicken-coops.

The captain of the little vessel was a round-faced, boyish-looking man,
of an English rather than a Spanish type, with clear gray honest eyes
and a winning expression o