bblestone pavements as they came in from the camps after
supplies; hundreds of hungry and destitute Cubans were set at work
cleaning the filthy streets; and in less than a week Santiago had
assumed something like the appearance that it must have presented before
the siege and capture. The thing that it needed most in the first
fortnight after the surrender was a hotel, and a hotel it did not have.
Newspaper correspondents, officers who had come into the city from the
camps, and passengers landed from the steamers had no place to go for
food or shelter, and many of them were forced to bivouac in the streets.
Captain William Astor Chanler, for example, tied his saddle-horse to his
leg one night and lay down to sleep on the pavement of the plaza in
front of the old cathedral.

The urgent need of a hotel finally compelled the steward of the
Anglo-American Club to throw open its twenty or more rooms to army
officers, cable-operators, and newspaper correspondents who had no other
place to stay, and to make an attempt, at least, to supply them with
food. A few cases of canned meat and beans and a barrel of hard bread
were obtained from the storehouse of the Red Cross; a cook and three or
four negro waiters were hired; and before the end of the first week
after the capture of the city the club was furnishing two meals a day to
as many guests as its rooms would accommodate, and had become the most
interesting and attractive place of social and intellectual
entertainment to be found on the island. One might meet there, almost
any night, English war correspondents who had campaigned in India,
Egypt, and the Sudan; Cuban sympathizers from the United States who had
served in the armies of Gomez and Garcia; old Indian fighters and
ranch-men from our Western plains and mountains; wealthy New York
club-men in the brown-linen uniform of Roosevelt's Rough Riders; naval
officers from the fleet of Admiral Sampson; and speculators,
coffee-planters, and merchant adventurers from all parts of the western
hemisphere. One could hardly ask a question with regard to any part of
the habitable globe or any event of modern times that somebody in the
club could not answer with all the fullness of personal knowledge, and
the conversation around the big library table in the evening was more
interesting and entertaining than any talk that I had heard in months.
But the evenings were not always given up wholly to conversation.
Sometimes Mr. Cobleigh of t