rished by the thousand. With the aid and cooeperation
of Mr. Ramsden, son of the British consul, Mr. Michelson, a wealthy
resident merchant, and two or three other foreign residents of Santiago,
Miss Barton opened a soup-kitchen on shore, as soon as provisions enough
had been landed from the _State of Texas_ to make a beginning, and
before Tuesday night the representatives of the Red Cross had given
bread and hot soup to more than ten thousand sick and half-starved
people, most of them returned refugees from Caney, who could not get a
mouthful to eat elsewhere in the city, and who were literally perishing
from hunger and exhaustion.

CHAPTER XVI

THE FEEDING OF THE HUNGRY

The problem of supplying myself with food and drink in the half-starved
city of Santiago, after the steamer had been quarantined against me,
proved to be even more serious than I had anticipated. In my walk up
Marina and Enramadas streets and out to the Caney road on Tuesday
forenoon I passed two or three restaurants bearing such seductive and
tantalizing names as "Venus," "Nectar," and "Delicias," etc., but they
were all closed, and in a stroll of two miles through the heart of the
city I failed to discover any food more "delicious" than a few half-ripe
mangoes in the dirty basket of a Cuban fruit-peddler, or any "nectar"
more drinkable than the water which ran into the gutter, here and there,
from the broken or leaky pipes of the city water-works. Hot, tired, and
dispirited, I returned about noon to the Anglo-American Club, took
another drink of lukewarm tea from my canteen, nibbled a piece of hard
bread, and opened a can of baked beans. The beans proved to be flavored
with tomato sauce, which I dislike; the hard bread was stale and tasted
of the haversack in which I had brought it ashore; and the tea was
neither strong enough to inebriate nor yet cool enough to cheer. There
did not seem to be any encouraging probability that I should be fed by
Cuban ravens or nourished by manna from the blazing Cuban skies, and in
the absence of some such miraculous interposition of Providence I
should evidently have either to go with a tin cup to the Red Cross
soup-kitchen and beg for a portion of soup on the ground that I was a
destitute and starving reconcentrado, or else return to the pier where
the _State of Texas_ lay, hail somebody on deck, and ask to have food
lowered to me over the ship's side. I could certainly drink a cup of
coffee and eat a p