became Spaniards; one said, smiling sadly, “Muchas gracias,” but the others merely smiled sadly; and I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in the faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity.  Italians would have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of another tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though we sometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation.  Perhaps there are even personal distinctions among their several nationalities, and there are some Spaniards who are as true and kind as some Americans.  When we remember Cortez let us not forget Las Casas.

They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark faces their sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as they turned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not “support the government” so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere.  But the truth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men, who, in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much like somebody’s brothers, and even somebody’s children.  I may have been infected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, which prevailed in the place.  There it was as wholly business to be kind and to cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be cruel and to kill.  How droll these things are!  The surgeons had their favorites among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted; inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of their hapless foes, whom they spoke of as “a sort of pets.”  One of these was very useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was liked apparently because he was so likable.  At a certain cot the chief surgeon stopped and said, “We did not expect this boy to live through the night.”  He took the boy’s wrist between his thumb and finger, and asked tenderly as he leaned over him, “Poco mejor?” The boy could not speak to say that he was a little better; he tried to smile—­such things do move the witness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek has been half chopped away by a machete tend to restore one’s composure.

LITERATURE AND LIFE—­American Literary Centers

by William Dean Howells

AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES

One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a literature of our own, we have no literary centre.  We have so much literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a literary centre.  We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace.  But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we deceive ourselves.  Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse.