century.

In 1642 it was captured by an English expedition under the Duke of Albemarle, and remained the headquarters of the British army during their occupation of Cuba. It consists of a strong outer fortification, where there are many cells devoted to those who are called 'incommunicarods' or doomed to solitary confinement. These are dreary rooms with floors and ceilings of stone, bare of furniture and lighted by a single grated window.

Three Iron Doors.

"On the walls are the usual evidences of how the unhappy inmates endeavored to while away the long, melancholy hours: Scraps of poetry, interspersed with prose, all of a forlorn tendency and generally signed with the name or initials of the captive. The passage from them into the interior leads through three iron doors, each one of which is carefully locked and barred before the succeeding one is opened.

"The quadrangle inside is nearly filled by a large building, which constitutes the prison proper, and which is evidently of rather modern construction. Above, it is devoted to store-rooms and the kitchen department, but underneath it is traversed from end to end by two long passages, about twenty feet in width, closed at each extremity by massive bars. These passages contain the suspects awaiting trial, and there, with nothing to protect them from the ocean breezes, which blow fiercely owing to the northern exposure, and with no beds or blankets, they remain for months and months. They are never permitted to go out, and can only take what exercise the limited space admits of

"Those who have relatives or friends may receive clothes, hammocks, and even food from them, but the less fortunate are condemned to sleep upon the stones and to endure the cold and wet, which enter freely through the open grating. One of these rooms or passages was occupied by 108 prisoners and the other by 104. It must be remembered that they are all still untried; in that stage, in fact, where our law would consider them as innocent. Here was a Spanish boy of fourteen, with an honest, kindly face, who has only been a

few months in Cuba, and who, from his youth and country, can hardly be supposed to be an aggressive insurgent.

"Lopez Coloma is another inmate, a man who took part the rising in Matanzas last February, but who surrendered in the following March under the amnesty proclamation of the Captain-General Calleja. For over a year Coloma has suffered for the faith which he placed in the word of a soldier and a Spanish Viceroy. In all prob. ability he will share the fate of Jose Gomez, a history of whose sufferings and tortures his wife is said to possess recorded in his biood. Of the other prisoners I could hear of but little evidence against them; yet, be they ever so guilty, no man of ordinary feeling could witness without a pang the inhumanity to which they are subjected in Morro Castle.”

A

CHAPTER XVII.

Pen-Pictures of the War.

BOUT the middle of March it was announced at Havana that General Weyler would issue another proclamation, which, it was admitted in official circles, would threaten Cubans who had left the Island and were domiciled in the United States with the confiscation of their property, unless they returned at once to their homes. This measure, according to the official apology for it, was to punish "those conspirators against the cause of Spain, out of the country as well as within it."

While this looked like a wholesale campaign of robbery, there was unquestionably plenty of ground for Spanish anger at the work of the patriots who escaped from her clutches, and were acting so safely and so effectively for their cause in organizing expeditions, working up public sentiment and receiving assistance from the people of the United States to carry on the war.

They were called conspirators. If they remained where they were their worldly goods were to be taken. If they returned they would in all probability be arrested as traitors and shot or banished. In either case the application of the decree would bring their estates within the laws and they would lose them.

General Weyler's last preceding proclamations occasioned surprise by their mildness. The Cubans seemed to attach less importance to the provisions relating to the confiscation of their estates than to the articles providing for the disposition of the Civil Guard in the principal towns. The Civil Guard is a part of the regular army. It is, in fact, the better part, because the regiments of which it is com posed are made up of picked men. At all times, in peace or in war, an army of these Civil Guards is maintained on the Island. They do police duty and preserve order in the country.

For over half a century Cuba has been under martial law, and these forces are continuously active. Peculiar powers have been vested in this institution, and with an extraordinary liberty in interpreting and enforcing laws, which has resulted in excesses against the property and even the lives of inhabitants, a protection has been thrown about them, so that for assault, extortion, libel, injury to property and a variety of other crimes a citizen has no redress.

The oppression and cruelties of which this department of the government has been guilty produced the bandits of Cuba. It was one of the multitude of evils which brought about the revolution, and besides its own criminality, it was the particular department of a corrupt administration with which the people were most often in contact. So many men have been assaulted and beaten to death by Civil Guards that a word has actually come into existence and taken its place in the Spanish language in Cuba to describe the action. causing death in that manner-" compote."

Driven to Desperation.

Women have been subjected to indignity from these "protectors" of peace and good order, in the presence of male members of their families, who dared not resent it. These representatives of the "holy cause," as Spain terms her "mission" in Cuba, have been the agents of corrupt governors and mayors for assassinating men, under the old, old story of the prisoner attempting to escape, or in oppression and blackmail, until the ruin of the victims was accomplished.

In Camaguey the people were driven to a point which resulted in their seizing and hanging some of the Civil Guards, and for a time that put an end to their practices in that province. At elections, the whole Civil Guard is simply a political machine, so powerful and so perfectly handled that, except in a few districts, it controls the vote.

Manuel Garcia, one of the most dashing leaders in Gomez's army, who was killed by a Spanish spy sent into his company, was a bandit in Cuba before the war broke out. How he came to be an outlaw is a fair example of the fate of many citizens. He was a respectable storekeeper in Quivican, just a little way out of Havana, young,

handsome and industrious, and was in love with a country woman. They were about to be married when one of the Civil Guards assaulted her. Garcia was immediately ordered to leave the country, the authorities doubtless expecting that he would kill the man, against whom it was impossible to bring any prosecution under the law, because nearly all offences committed by members of the Civil Guard are permitted to be tried by the Civil Guards themselves.

Beaten and Left for Dead.

He did not instantly shut up his store and abandon everything he had in the world, and a few days later two of the Civil Guards arrested him and took him to a place where he was stripped and tied to a tree and beaten with a bamboo rod until he was left apparently dead. He was found shortly by some farmers who were hunting for lost cattle in the woods, and was carried to a house, where he recovered. Garcia met two other guards on the road while making his way back to Quivican. He said their salutation was: “If you haven't had enough to cause you to obey the orders, we will see that you get it now."

Whether this is true is of no importance; but, whatever the manner of their meeting may have been, it ended in Garcia killing both with his machete and then fleeing for his life. A price of $5,000 was put upon his head, but he was never captured. In about a year he appeared as the leader of a company of fifteen or twenty men, and after 1892 he was a terror to the two provinces of Havana and Matanzas.

The Spanish version of how Garcia became a bandit differs only in the point that as a butcher he sold stolen meat; that he was a thief and always a criminal, and that the respectable storekeeper of the family was Vicente Garcia. It is interesting, however, to know that after Manuel Garcia was a bandit "compote was administered to this respectable merchant for his brother's crimes, and the abuse resulted in his also going to the woods and joining Manuel.

Strange as it may seem, Garcia carried on his depredations within a radius seldom farther from Havana than twenty miles. At one