Our officer came towards us and said gayly, “Well, you have seen the animals fed,” and let us take our grateful leave.  I think we were rather a loss, in our going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance to talk.  I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard at the inner gate, who walked his beat with reluctance when it took him from us, and eagerly when it brought him back.  Then he delayed for a rapid and comprehensive exchange of opinions and ideas, successfully blending military subordination with American equality in his manner.

The whole thing was very American in the perfect decorum and the utter absence of ceremony.  Those good fellows were in the clothes they wore through the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put on much splendor if they had wished, but apparently they did not wish.  They were simple, straightforward, and adequate.  There was some dry joking about the superiority of the prisoners’ rations and lodgings, and our officer ironically professed his intention of messing with the Spanish officers.  But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or of that stupid and atrocious hate towards the public enemy which abominable newspapers and politicians had tried to breed in the popular mind.  There was nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live up to that military ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil ideal of self-interest.  Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are united for the operation of the industries as they now are for the hostilities.

IV.

Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike, imparted itself from what I had seen?  Or was this more properly an effect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundred and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers?  I cannot say that a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a more positive humanity which was at work.  Most of the sufferers were stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, which received them, four days after the orders for their reception had come, with every equipment for their comfort.  At five o’clock, when we passed down the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay, nonchalant effect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but it was really the thermometers with which the nurses were taking their temperature.  It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked if they were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke, anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of cigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon.  I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the sick captives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to the least.  They took my largesse gravely, as