It is as hot in some parts of Texas, Arizona and California as in any of the islands of the seas of the South, but we had not been educated in the art of clothing armies for service in the torrid zone, until the Philippine expedition was undertaken, and we were making ready for challenging the Spaniards in their Cuban fastnesses, when it speedily was in evidence that we wanted something more than blue cloth and blankets.  The Spanish white and blue stuff and straw hats were to our eyes unsightly and distasteful, and we began with a variety of goods.  Our army hats were found good, but we tried nearly all things before holding onto anything as sufficient for trousers and coats.  The officers on long journeys speedily resolved, if we may judge from the results, that the suit most natty and nice for wear within twenty degrees of the Equator was the perfect white, and so the snowy figures below shoulder straps became familiar.  This did not, of course, indicate acute stages of active service.  Never were campaigns more destructive of good looks in clothing, than those in assailing Santiago and Manila, in which the thin stuffs were tested in torrential rain and ditches full of mud.  The compensation was that the volunteers fresh from the camps of instruction, put on in a few days the appearance of veteran campaigners.  In Manila there was an edifying contrast between the Spaniards who had surrendered and the Americans who did not pause when the Mausers were fired into their ranks, not with the faintest hope of successful resistance, but for the “honor of Spain.”  The Spanish soldiers had been well sheltered and came out in fairly clean clothes, while the soldiers of our nation closed up dingy ranks, suited for hunting in swamps and thickets, their coats, hats and trousers the color of blasted grass and decayed leaves.  The passage of the line from the new to the old clothes was sudden, and the gallant boys in blue were not in the least disconsolate over the discoloration of their uniforms, having reached the stage where it was a luxury to sleep on a floor or pavement, without wasting time to find a soft or quiet spot.

The sombre taste of the Spanish ladies in dress, so famous and effective that the black mantillas and skirts, and the fans that do such execution in the hands of the dark-eyed coquettes, as to have sway where empires have been lost and won—­control Cuba, but does not dominate the Philippines.  The Pope of the period, it will be remembered, divided the new worlds discovered by the navigators of Spain and Portugal, awarding to the best of his knowledge, by a line drawn south from the southern shore of the Caribbean Sea.  Portugal holding that to the eastward and Spain that to the westward.  Hence the separation of South America between Brazil and the rest of the central and south American states, to await the inevitable end of the evolutions that were the revolutions of independence.  Magellines, a Portuguese, who, being slighted in his own country, went over to the Spaniards, and pointed out that by sailing west the east would be attained, and so found the straits that bear his name, and the Ladrones and Philippines, annihilating the Papal boundary line by taking and breaking it from the rear.