There were several other sketches and caricatures on the left-hand wall; but none of them was as good as were the two that I have described, and, after examining them all carefully, I cast my eyes about the room to see what I could find in the shape of "loot" that would be worth carrying away as a memento of the place. Apart from old shoes, a modern kerosene-lamp of glass, a dirty blanket or two, and a cot-bed, there seemed to be nothing worth confiscating except a couple of Spanish newspapers hanging against the right-hand wall on a nail. One was "El Imparcial," a sheet as large as the New York "Sun"; and the other, "La Saeta," an illustrated comic paper about the size of "Punch." They had no intrinsic value, of course, and as "relics" they were not particularly characteristic; but "newspapers from a bastion in Morro Castle" would be interesting, I thought, to some of my journalistic friends at home, so I decided to take them. I put up my hand to lift them off the nail without tearing them, and was amazed to discover that neither nail nor newspapers had any tangible existence. They had been drawn on the plaster, by that confounded soldier-artist, with a lead-pencil I felt worse deceived and more chagrined than the Greek pony that neighed at the painted horse of Apelles! But I need not have felt so humiliated. Those newspapers would have deceived the elect; and I am not sure that the keenest-sighted proof-reader of the "Imparcial" would not have read and corrected a whole column before he discovered that the paper was plaster and that the letters had been made with a pencil. Major Greene of the United States Signal-Service, to whom I described these counterfeit newspapers, went to the castle a few days later, and, notwithstanding the fact that he had been forewarned, he tried to take "La Saeta" off the nail. He trusted me enough to believe that one of the papers was deceptive; but he felt sure that a real copy of "La Saeta" had been hung over a counterfeit "Imparcial" in order to make the latter look more natural. If the soldier who drew the caricatures, portraits, and newspapers in that guard-room escaped shot, shell, and calenture, and returned in safety to Spain, I hope that he may sometime find in a Spanish journal a translation of this chapter, and thus be made aware of the respectful admiration that I shall always entertain for him and his artistic talents. In all the rooms of the castle that had been occupied by soldiers I found, scratched or penciled on the walls, checker-board calendars on which the days had been successively crossed off; rude pictures and caricatures of persons or things; individual names; and brief reflections or remarks in doggerel rhyme or badly spelled prose, which had been suggested to the writers, apparently, by their unsatisfactory environment. One man, for example, has left on record this valuable piece of advice: