There was no road.  Most of the way we followed the partly constructed road-bed for the new railway, making frequent detours, through field or jungle, to get around gaps or places of impossible roughness.  Before we had covered two miles, we began to wish that the man who sent those horses, a Spaniard, by the way, might be doomed to ride them through all eternity under the saddles with which they were equipped.  We were sorry enough for the poor brutes, but sorrier still for ourselves.  For several days, I limped in misery from a long row of savage blisters raised on my leg by rawhide knots with which my saddle had been repaired.  An hour after starting, we were overtaken by a heavy thunder-shower.  At nightfall, after having covered about fifteen wretched miles, we reached a construction camp where an American nobleman, disguised as a section-boss, gave us food and lodging in the little palm-leaf shack that served as his temporary home.  It was barely big enough for one, but he made it do for three.

[Illustration:  STREET AND CHURCH Camaguey]

Early in the morning, we resumed our journey, plodding along as best we could over a half-graded “right-of-way.”  A couple of hours brought us to a larger construction camp where we halted for such relief as we could secure.  We then were some twelve or fourteen miles from our destination.  We discussed the wisdom of making the rest of the way on foot, as preferable to that particular kind of saddle-work, leaving our baggage to come along with the horses when it might.  But fortune smiled, or it may have been just a grimace.  Word came that a team, two horses and a wagon, would go to the city that afternoon, and there would be room for us.  We told our pilot, the man with the horses, just what we thought of him and all his miserable ancestors, gave him a couple of pesos, and rejoiced over our prospects of better fortune.  But it proved to be only an escape from the fire into the frying-pan.  I have driven over many miles of South African veldt, straight “across lots,” in all comfort, but while the general topography of Camaguey puts it somewhat into the veldt class, its immediate surface did not in the least remind me of the South African plateau.  The trip was little short of wonderful for its bumpiness.  We got to Camaguey sore and bruised but, as far as we could discover, physically intact, and, having arrived, may now return to its history and description.  May no “gentle reader” who scans these pages repeat our experience in getting there.  It is supposed that here, or immediately here-about, was the place of “fifty houses and a thousand people” encountered by the messengers of Columbus, when he sent them inland to deliver official letters of introduction to the gorgeous ruler of the country in which he thought he was.  Different writers tell different stories about the settlement of the place, but there is no doubt that it was among the earliest to be settled.  Columbus gave to a harbor