e had run its happy-go-lucky course briefly and brilliantly,
with "glory enough for all," even for Chesterton. For, in no previous
campaign had good fortune so persistently stood smiling at his elbow. At
each moment of the war that was critical, picturesque, dramatic, by some
lucky accident he found himself among those present. He could not lose.
Even when his press boat broke down at Cardenas, a Yankee cruiser and
two Spanish gun-boats, apparently for his sole benefit, engaged in an
impromptu duel within range of his megaphone. When his horse went lame,
the column with which he had wished to advance, passed forward to the
front unmolested, while the rear guard, to which he had been forced to
join his fortune, fought its way through the stifling underbrush.

Between his news despatches, when he was not singing the praises of
his fellow-countrymen, or copying lists of their killed and wounded, he
wrote to Miss Armitage. His letters were scrawled on yellow copy
paper and consisted of repetitions of the three words, "I love you,"
rearranged, illuminated, and intensified.

Each letter began much in the same way. "The war is still going on. You
can read about it in the papers. What I want you to know is that I love
you as no man ever--" And so on for many pages.

From her only one of the letters she wrote reached him. It was picked up
in the sand at Siboney after the medical corps, in an effort to wipe out
the yellow-fever, had set fire to the post-office tent.

She had written it some weeks before from her summer home at Newport,
and in it she said: "When you went to the front, I thought no woman
could love more than I did then. But, now I know. At least I know one
girl who can. She cannot write it. She can never tell you. You must just
believe.

"Each day I hear from you, for as soon as the paper comes, I take it
down to the rocks and read your cables, and I look south across the
ocean to Cuba, and try to see you in all that fighting and heat and
fever. But I am not afraid. For each morning I wake to find I love you
more; that it has grown stronger, more wonderful, more hard to bear.
And I know the charm I gave you grows with it, and is more powerful,
and that it will bring you back to me wearing new honors, 'bearing your
sheaves with you.'

"As though I cared for your new honors. I want YOU, YOU, YOU--only YOU."

When Santiago surrendered and the invading army settled down to arrange
terms of peace, and imbibe feve