it was to have full stomachs.  But the marines said they never acknowledged it, and the one who had a German accent intimated that gratitude was not a virtue of any Roman (I suppose he meant Latin) people.  But I do not know that if I were a prisoner, for no fault of my own, I should be very explicitly thankful for being unusually well fed.  I thought (or I think now) that a fig or a bunch of grapes would have been more acceptable to me under my own vine and fig-tree than the stew and roast of captors who were indeed showing themselves less my enemies than my own government, but were still not quite my hosts.

III.

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?  The clock strikes twelve as it strikes two, and with no more premonition.  As we stood there expecting nothing better of it than three at the most, it suddenly struck twelve.  Our officer appeared at the inner gate and bade our marines slide away the gate of barbed wire and let us into the enclosure, where he welcomed us to seats on the grass against the stockade, with many polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside it were not chairs.

The prisoners were already filing out of their quarters, at a rapid trot towards the benches where those great wash-boilers of coffee were set.  Each man had a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in his turn received quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a big ladleful of steaming coffee, which he made off with to his place at one of the long tables under a shed at the side of the stockade.  One young fellow tried to get a place not his own in the shade, and our officer when he came back explained that he was a guerrillero, and rather unruly.  We heard that eight of the prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own officers, for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were docile and obedient enough, and seemed only too glad to get peacefully at their bread and coffee.

First among them came the men of the Cristobal Colon, and these were the best looking of all the captives.  From their pretty fair average the others varied to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to be ex-convicts, brought up the rear.  They were nearly all little fellows, and very dark, though here and there a six-footer towered up, or a blond showed among them.  They were joking and laughing together, harmlessly enough, but I must own that they looked a crew of rather sorry jail-birds; though whether any run of humanity clad in misfits of our navy blue and white, and other chance garments, with close-shaven heads, and sometimes bare feet, would have looked much less like jail-birds I am not sure.  Still, they were not prepossessing, and though some of them were pathetically young, they had none of the charm of boyhood.  No doubt they did not do themselves justice, and to be herded there like cattle did not improve their chances of making a favorable impression