experience in Russia, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and European Turkey, I have never seen streets so filthy as in some parts of this Cuban city, nor have I ever encountered such a variety of abominable stenches as I met with in the course of my short walk from the steamer to the Anglo-American Club. The houses and shops which stood along these narrow, dirty streets were generally one story in height, with red-tiled roofs, high, blank walls of stuccoed or plastered brick covered with a calcimine wash of pale blue or dirty yellow, large, heavy plank doors, and equally large, unglazed windows protected by prison gratings of iron bars and closed with tight inner shutters. There were no trees in the streets,--at least, in the business part of the city,--no yards in front of the houses, no shop-windows for the display of goods, and no windows of glass even in the best private houses. I cannot remember to have seen a pane of window-glass in this part of Cuba. The windows of both shops and houses were mere rectangular openings in the wall, six feet by ten or twelve feet in size, filled with heavy iron gratings or protected by ornamental metal scrollwork embedded all around in the solid masonry. These barred windows, with the heavy plank doors, thick stuccoed walls, and complete absence of architectural ornament, made the narrow, muddy streets look almost as gloomy and forbidding as if they were shut in by long rows of Russian prisons. The natural gloominess of the city, due to the narrowness of the streets and the character of the architecture, was heightened at the time of the surrender by the absence of a large part of the population and the consequent shutting up of more than half the houses. Thousands of men, women, and children had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and the long rows of closed and empty houses in some of the streets suggested a city stricken by pestilence and abandoned. At the time when we landed there was not a shop or a store open in any part of Santiago. Here and there one might see a colored woman peering out through the grated window of a private house, or two or three naked children with tallowy complexions and swollen abdomens playing in the muddy gutter, but as a rule the houses were shut and barred and the streets deserted.