collecting them carefully one by one, and putting them into their hats
or tying them up in their shirt-tails and the hems of their tattered
frocks. In one instance half a bushel or more of corn-meal escaped from
a torn bag and lay in a heap on the dirty pier. One of the prowling
Cuban boys espied it, gathered up a hatful of it, and then looked around
for something in which he could put the remainder. Failing to see
anything that could be utilized as a receptacle, he seemed for a moment
to be in despair; but presently a bright thought flashed into his mind,
and was reflected in his thin, eager, street-Arab face. Taking out of
his pocket two bits of dirty string, he tied his loose cotton trousers
tightly around his ankles, and then, unbuttoning his waist-band, he
began scooping up the corn-meal from the filthy planks and shoveling it
into his baggy breeches. Five minutes later he waddled off the pier in
triumph, looking, so far as his legs were concerned, like a big, badly
stuffed sawdust doll, or a half-starved gamin suffering from
elephantiasis.
As the day advanced, the number of men and children who crowded about
the steamer watching for opportunities to pilfer or pick up food became
so great that it was necessary to clear the pier and put a guard of
soldiers there to exclude the public altogether. Then the hungry people
formed in a dense mass in the street opposite the steamer, and stood
there in the blazing sunshine for hours, watching the little flat-cars
loaded with provisions as they were rolled past to the warehouse. From
an English cable-operator, who came down to the pier, we learned that
for weeks there had been nothing in the city to eat except rice, and
that the supply even of that was limited. Hard-bread crackers had sold
as high as one dollar apiece and canned meat at four dollars a can, and
many well-to-do families had not tasted bread, meat, or milk in more
than a month.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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