In the dry season matters are a trifle better, the fevers diminish, and it is possible to sleep in the open air without serious risk. The insects, too, are a trifle less vicious, and the brilliant moonlit winter's nights are often pleasant enough. Then the bivouac becomes endurable, and if the enemy is sufficiently distant, a certain element of gaiety lends a picturesque, even romantic, character to the barbaric gathering. The negroes twang their banjos, blow their horns, and dance in rings, and the white adventurers gather round the camp fires, to tell old-world stories, or dream, perchance, of their childhood, spent under more temperate skies,--and in their heart of hearts, as their recollection slips back to home, to regret they ever embarked on such pitiful adventures as these. Suddenly the alert is called, the trumpet blows, an order is hoarsely shouted, and the motley crowd moves on elsewhere, or is commanded to make a descent on some plantation to demand provisions, and, may be, if the owner does not comply, to fire his sugar canes. Not unfrequently, to screen their flight, they set light to the prairie or to the forest, and the grass and the trees burn on for days and nights on end. Some of these bands have a chaplain with them--a priest of the sort called in England, before the Reformation, a "hedge-priest"--who, on Sundays and feast days, celebrates Mass at an improvised altar, in some forest glade. But, on the other hand, the negroes, of whom there are thousands, seem, as a result of the free life they lead, to have reverted, in most cases, by a species of atavism, to their old savage habits. I have said elsewhere that in the olden days their Cuban masters only gave them a veneer of Christianity; they soon relapse into the obscene and bloody creed of Voudism, the traditions of which they have never lost. And in almost every rebel camp there are a number of coolies who, although--to please the Cubans--they prostrate themselves before the images of Neustra Señora de Cobre, and of Our Lady of Guadalupe, secretly practise the lowest forms of Buddhism.