About fifteen hundred Cubans, of General Garcia's command, had been brought to Siboney the day before on one of our transports; and although most of them had started for the front, several hundred were still roaming through the village, or standing here and there in groups on the beach. They did not, at first sight, impress me very favorably. Fully four fifths of them were mulattoes or blacks; the number of half-grown boys was very large; there was hardly a suggestion of a uniform in the whole command; most of the men were barefooted, and their coarse, drooping straw hats, cotton shirts, and loose, flapping cotton trousers had been torn by thorny bushes and stained with Cuban mud until they looked worse than the clothes that a New England farmer hangs on a couple of crossed sticks in his corn-field to scare away the crows. If their rifles and cartridge-belts had been taken away from them they would have looked like a horde of dirty Cuban beggars and ragamuffins on the tramp. I do not mean to say, or even to suggest, that these ragamuffins were not brave men and good soldiers. They may have been both, in spite of their disreputable appearance. When, for months together, a man has lived the life of an outlaw in the woods, scrambling through tropical jungles, wading marshy rivers, and sleeping, without tent or blankets, on the ground, he cannot be expected to look like a veteran of the regular army on dress-parade in a garrison town. Many of our own men, in the later weeks of the Santiago campaign, were almost as ragged and dirty as the poorest of the soldiers who came with General Garcia to Siboney. The Cubans disappointed me, I suppose, because I had pictured them to myself as a better dressed and better disciplined body of men, and had not made allowance enough for the hardships and privations of an insurgent's life. Turning our backs on the cove, the pier, the white tents of the quartermasters, the tarpaulin-covered piles of provision-boxes, and the throng of soldiers, insurgents, and refugees on the beach, we climbed a steep bank, crossed the railroad-track just west of the red-iron bridge, and joined a company of the Second Infantry on its way to the front.