CHAPTER IX.
“CUANDO SALIDE LA HABANA”
“I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Cæsar bled;
That every hyacinth the garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head.”
THE dream days have come and gone. We have left historic Santiago with its forts and battle-fields, and the beautiful harbour of busy commercial Cienfuegos; we have skirted along the southern coast of Cuba, Pearl of the Antilles, through the Yucatan Channel, into the Gulf of Mexico, and now we are come to Havana, where countless voices call us in every direction both day and night.
And yet it is not of Santiago, the old Merrimac lying in midchannel, El Caney, or San Juan Hill that I am writing to-day—no, nor of the wrecks of Cervera’s fleet strewn in rocking skeletons along the coast. No, those stories have long since been well told you—those tragic stories of battle and death, gone now into the past with the echoes of muffled drums and the shuffling feet of sick soldier boys, dragging themselves home when the day of vengeance was over. No, it is not of that I am writing, but of a day which I gave to you, O mothers of our glorious marines! and I take it now from out the memories of those sunny isles, a precious keepsake, that it may be yours for ever.
You are known to me, yet I cannot speak your names. You are near to me, yet the continent divides us. Your eyes speak to me, and yet, should we meet, you would pass unrecognised. A universal love, a universal memory has called you to me, and space cannot separate us.
In this city of beauty, though alluring at every turn, there was one pilgrimage, come what may, I would not fail to make. The Morro and Cabañas might be slighted, but not that patch of green earth away over the hill where the boys of the Maine lie buried so near the waters that engulfed them.
