onry.
These barred windows, with the heavy plank doors, thick stuccoed walls,
and complete absence of architectural ornament, made the narrow, muddy
streets look almost as gloomy and forbidding as if they were shut in by
long rows of Russian prisons. The natural gloominess of the city, due to
the narrowness of the streets and the character of the architecture, was
heightened at the time of the surrender by the absence of a large part
of the population and the consequent shutting up of more than half the
houses. Thousands of men, women, and children had fled to Caney and
other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and the long rows of
closed and empty houses in some of the streets suggested a city stricken
by pestilence and abandoned. At the time when we landed there was not a
shop or a store open in any part of Santiago. Here and there one might
see a colored woman peering out through the grated window of a private
house, or two or three naked children with tallowy complexions and
swollen abdomens playing in the muddy gutter, but as a rule the houses
were shut and barred and the streets deserted.

The first pleasant impression that I received in Santiago was made by
the Anglo-American Club. It was situated on a narrow, dirty street
behind the Spanish theater, in a very low, disreputable part of the
city, and did not impress me, at first sight, as being likely to afford
even the ordinary necessaries and comforts of life, much less the
luxuries and conveniences suggested to the mind of a city man by the
word "club." But external appearance in a Spanish-American city is often
deceptive, and it was so in this case. Opposite the rear or stage
entrance of the theater, where half a dozen soldiers of the Ninth
Infantry were cooking breakfast in the street, my ragged Cuban guide
turned into a dark vaulted passage which looked as if it might be one of
the approaches to a jail. "It can't be possible," I said to myself,
"that this damp, gloomy tunnel is the entrance to a club; the guide must
have misunderstood the directions given him."

But the guide was right. At a distance of thirty-five or forty feet from
the street the vaulted passage opened into a paved patio, or court,--a
sort of large, square well,--in the center of which stood a green,
thrifty, broad-leaved banana-tree, fifteen or twenty feet in height.
From the corners of this court, on the side opposite the street
entrance, two broad flights of steps led up to wh