swinging around broadside to the sea while being launched. The best time for this work was between five and ten o'clock in the morning. After ten o'clock there was almost always a fresh breeze from the southeast, which raised such a surf on the beach that unless the landing of supplies was a matter of extreme urgency it had to be temporarily suspended. We succeeded in getting ashore on Wednesday food enough to satisfy the wants of the refugees at Firmeza, and Mr. Elwell was sent there to superintend its distribution. Wednesday evening, as there seemed to be no prospect of an immediate engagement at the front, I decided to go to Port Antonio, Jamaica, with Mr. Trumbull White, on the Chicago "Record's" despatch-boat _Hercules_, to post my letters and the letters that had been intrusted to me by Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt, and to get some articles of camp equipment which I had ordered in New York, but which had failed to reach me before the _State of Texas_ sailed from Key West. We reached Port Antonio at eight o'clock on Thursday, spent the day there, and returned the next night to Siboney. Early Friday morning, as we were approaching the Cuban coast, the captain of the _Hercules_ came down into the cabin with the astounding news that the blockading fleet had disappeared. "The jig is up, boys!" he exclaimed excitedly. "They've taken the city, and the fleet is inside the harbor. I can't see a sign of a ship anywhere along the coast." We all rushed on deck and gazed with sinking hearts at the long black line of the rampart and the high blue mountains beyond it. If Santiago had been taken in our absence, it would be the cruelest blow that fortune had ever dealt us! Although the sun was still below the horizon, the atmosphere was crystal-clear, and we could see without a glass the step-like outline of Morro Castle, and even the hazy blue smoke rising from the camp-fires on-the beach at Siboney; but of the war-ships--the _New York_, the _Brooklyn_, the _Indiana_, and the _Texas_--there was not a sign. I do not know what Mr. White thought,--he seemed to be as cool and imperturbable as ever,--but when I fully realized that the fleet was not there, and drew from that fact the inevitable conclusion that the city had been captured, I was ready to anathematize the British West Indies, Port Antonio, the _Hercules_, and the cruel ill luck which had taken me a hundred miles away at the decisive moment of the Santiago campaign.