g mothers and motherless babes, the
homelessness and squalor, the hopelessness and despair, are beyond all
words and all conception, save to those who saw and lived among them. It
is past and let it rest.

Then followed the declaration of hostilities, the blockade, the fleets
of war, and the stately, glistening white ships of relief that dotted
the sea--our navy after forty years of peace again doing service in its
own waters--and among them one inconspicuous, black-hulled sea-going
craft, laden with food for the still famishing reconcentrados, when they
could be reached.

Day after day, in its weary, waiting cruise, it watched out for an
opening to that closed-in suffering island, till at length the thunder
of the guns, Siboney, San Juan, opened the track, and the wounded troops
of our own army, hungering on their own fields, were the reconcentrados
of the hour.

Tampa became the gathering-point of the army. Its camps filled like
magic, first with regulars, then volunteers, as if the fiery torch of
Duncraigen had spread over the hills and prairies of America. The great
ships gathered in the waters, the transports, with decks dark with human
life, passed in and out, and the battleships of the sea held ever their
commanding sway. It seemed a strange thing, this gathering for war.
Thirty years of peace had made it strange to all save the veterans of
the days of the old war, long passed into history. Could it be possible
that we were to learn this anew? Were men again to fall, and women weep?
Were the youth of this generation to gain that experience their fathers
had gained, to live the war-lives they had lived, and die the deaths
they had died?

At length the fleet moved on, and we prepared to move with, or rather
after it. The quest on which it had gone, and the route it had taken,
bordered something on the mystery shrouding the days when Sherman
marched to the sea. Where were the Spanish ships? What would be the
result when found and met? Where were we to break that Cuban wall and
let us in?

Always present in our minds were the food we carried, the willing hands
that waited, and the perishing thousands that needed. We knew the great
hospital ships were fitting for the care of the men of both Army and
Navy. Surely they could have no need of us.

We had taken possession of our ship at Key West on the 29th of April. It
was now the 20th of June and the national records of two countries at
least will always give the