“Baggage on the transport now, and we sail this afternoon.  Am sorry to leave all of you, and I have a tear in my eye now that I can’t keep back.  It isn’t a summer picnic, and I don’t feel like shouting when I think of home; but I’m always lucky, and I’ll come out all right.  I’m afraid I sha’n’t see brother at all.  I tried to look cheerful for my picture (enclosed).  Good-by.

     “Some delay; actually on board and steam up.

“Waiting—­waiting—­waiting.  It’s bad enough to go to Cuba in boats like these, but to lie around for days is trying.  No one goes ashore, and I can hear nothing of brother.  I wonder why the General didn’t give him that commission instead of me.  There is a curious sort of fellow here, who says he knows brother.  His name is Blackford, and he is very kind to me.  He used to be a regular, and he says he thinks brother took his place in the —­th and is a regular now himself—­a private; I don’t understand.  There is mighty little Rough Riding about this.

     “P.  S.—­My bunkie is from Boston—­Bob Sumner.  His father commanded
     a negro regiment in a fight once against my father; think of it!

     “Hurrah! we’re off.”

It was a tropical holiday—­that sail down to Cuba—­a strange, huge pleasure-trip of steamships, sailing in a lordly column of three; at night, sailing always, it seemed, in a harbour of brilliant lights under multitudinous stars and over thickly sown beds of tiny phosphorescent stars that were blown about like flowers in a wind-storm by the frothing wake of the ships; by day, through a brilliant sunlit sea, a cool breeze—­so cool that only at noon was the heat tropical—­and over smooth water, blue as sapphire.  Music night and morning, on each ship, and music coming across the little waves at any hour from the ships about.  Porpoises frisking at the bows and chasing each other in a circle around bow and stern as though the transports sat motionless; schools of flying-fish with filmy, rainbow wings rising from one wave and shimmering through the sunlight to the foamy crest of another—­sometimes hundreds of yards away.  Beautiful clear sunsets of rose, gold-green, and crimson, with one big, pure radiant star ever like a censor over them; every night the stars more deeply and thickly sown and growing ever softer and more brilliant as the boats neared the tropics; every day dawn rich with beauty and richer for the dewy memories of the dawns that were left behind.

Now and then a little torpedo-boat would cut like a knife-blade through the water on messenger service; or a gunboat would drop lightly down the hill of the sea, along the top of which it patrolled so vigilantly; and ever on the horizon hung a battle-ship that looked like a great gray floating cathedral.  But nobody was looking for a fight—­nobody thought the Spaniard would fight—­and so these were only symbols of war; and even they seemed merely playing the game.