t take what comes our way? It is only for a little while, and
then the great antique mother receives us once more in her bosom. And
there are so many people in the world. Think again of all the countless
hordes who have come and gone, and who will come and go; the immense sea
of Time covers them, and what matters the life they led? What odds is it
that they ever existed at all? Let us do our best to be happy; the earth
is good and sweet-smelling, there is sunshine and colour and youth and
loveliness; and afterwards--well, let us shrug our shoulders and not
think of it.

And then in bitter irony, contradicting my moral, a train came in with a
number of Cuban soldiers. There were above fifty of them, and they had
to change at the junction. They reached out to open the carriage doors
and crawled down to the platform. Some of them seemed at death's door;
they could not walk, and chairs were brought that they might be carried;
others leaned heavily on their companions. And they were dishevelled,
with stubbly beards. But what struck me most was the deathly colour; for
their faces were almost green, while round their sunken eyes were great
white rings, and the white was ghastly, corpse-like. They trooped along
in a dazed and listless fashion, wasted with fever, and now and then
one stopped, shaken with a racking cough; he leaned against the wall,
and put his hand to his heart as if the pain were unendurable. It was a
pitiful sight. They were stunted and under-sized; they ceased to develop
when they went to the cruel island, and they were puny creatures with
hollow chests and thin powerless limbs; often, strangely enough, their
faces had remained quite boyish. They were twenty or twenty-two, and
they looked sixteen. And then, by the sight of those boys who had never
known youth with its joyful flowers, doomed to a hopeless life, I was
forced against my will to another moral. Perhaps some would recover, but
the majority must drag on with ruined health, fever-stricken, dying one
by one, falling like the unripe fruit of a rotten tree. They had no
chance, poor wretches! They would return to their miserable homes; they
could not work, and their people were too poor to keep them--so they
must starve. Their lives were even shorter than those of the rest, and
what pleasure had they had?

And that is the result of the Spanish insouciance--death and corruption,
loss of power and land and honour, the ruin of countless lives, and
absolute