President Baez of Santo Domingo was short and thin and had a washed-out look, as though his skin had been faded by chemicals instead of by a three-quarters’ admixture of white blood. He had large full eyes that were shifty and insincere. He was clever but superficial, cunning and treacherous. Had I seen him before I went to his cursed country, to reorganize his army and aid in putting down the growing revolutionary sentiment, I would have remained in Venezuela or gone elsewhere in search of adventure, for he looked a coward and provoked distrust. I had heard of him only as a good fighter but that reputation, I became convinced soon after my first visit to the “palace,” had been earned for him by his former friends and supporters and was in no sense the work of his own sword, at least so far as recent years were concerned. In his earlier days he might have displayed more bravery, and he must have shown some courage to arouse a fighting degree of loyalty that had four times swept the country, but presuming that to be true he had gone back greatly with advancing age. He seemed to have convinced the superstitious mulattoes, with whom the still more fanatical full-blooded blacks were always at war, that he was a real man of destiny whose course could not safely be interfered with, and his successive successes probably were due more to that belief than to any other cause. His brother, the Minister of War, had all of the President’s faults in accentuated form and added to them an inordinate vanity. He was jealous of me from the start. He had expected that I would recommend to him such changes in the “military establishment” as I thought wise, but I insisted on doing things myself and having a free hand, which the President was quite willing to give me, perhaps because he was suspicious of even his own brother.