The other ladies said they wished they were Americans, that they might also be helped out of their miserable position.

These ladies do not as yet know why they have been arrested.  They all have relatives in the insurgent army, and suppose that is the reason for their punishment.

* * * * *

The Three Friends, the filibustering steamer that has been in so much trouble, will soon know her fate.

She is to be proceeded against for piracy.

The officers, agents, and lawyers are not included in the new case, and so there is no danger of any of them having to pay the penalty of piracy, which the law says is hanging.

The vessel alone is the guilty party, and if her guilt is proved, she will be confiscated, which means, taken away from her owners.

We spoke about the trial of the tug Dauntless and the Three Friends in No. 14 of the great round world, and told how Judge Locke had set them at liberty, because he said that if no state of war existed in Cuba, the tugs could not be guilty of breaking any of the laws between nations.

Attorney-General Harmon says that this decision of Judge Locke’s makes the Three Friends guilty of piracy, for in time of peace she fired a gun on the subjects of a friendly nation.

It seems that whichever way they fix it, the Three Friends is in trouble.

The whole case rests upon the statement, made in certain New York newspapers, that the Three Friends had a Hotchkiss gun in her bows, with which she fired on the Spanish gunboat that tried to prevent her landing her party.

If this statement is true, the Three Friends is guilty, and will have some difficulty in escaping from justice.  But it is evident that her owners are going to deny the whole thing, and say that she had no gun on board.

In Jacksonville, where she will be tried, the people are already saying that it is foolish to suppose that there was a gun on so small a tug as the Three Friends, and in Washington it is thought unlikely that it can be proved that a gun was on the boat.

This makes the matter very interesting, because the New York newspapers which published the story will not like to have it proved that they print anything which is not true.

They must do everything in their power to prove that the report was true, while the owners of the tug will make every effort to prove that it was false, and only a made-up story sent by the newspaper correspondent to give his paper an interesting item.

These “interesting” items are so frequent that people are afraid to believe all they read in the papers.

It is for this very reason that we have warned our readers that it is not safe to say “such and such a thing has happened” until time enough has passed to prove or contradict a statement; and this is the reason why we so often say, “it is said that this or that has happened.”  We want to be quite sure that a thing is true before we assert it as a fact.