turrets, forming a perfect picture of a rock-ribbed fortress of the middle ages.  This is the famous castle of San Jago, the Moro, which antedates the more familiar fortress of the same name in Havana harbor by at least a hundred years.  Words are of little use in describing this antique, Moorish-looking stronghold, with its crumbling, honey-combed battlements, queer little flanking turrets and shadowy towers, perched upon the face of a dun-colored cliff 150 feet high—­so old, so odd, so different from anything in America with which to compare it.  A photograph, or pencil sketch is not much better, and even a paint brush could not reproduce the exact shadings of its time-worn, weather-mellowed walls—­the Oriental pinks and old blues and predominating yellows that give it half its charm.  Upon the lowermost wall, directly overhanging the sea, is a dome-shaped sentry box of stone, flanked by antiquated cannon.  Above it the lines of masonry are sharply drawn, each guarded terrace receding upon the one next higher, all set with cannon and dominated by a massive tower of obsolete construction.

It takes a good while to see it all, for new stories and stairways, wings and terraces, are constantly cropping out in unexpected places, but as it occupies three sides of the rounding cliff and the pilot who comes aboard at the entrance to the channel guides your steamer close up under the frowning battlements, you have ample time to study it.  Window holes cut into rock in all directions show how extensive are the excavations.  A large garrison is always quartered here, even in time of peace, when their sole business is searching for shady places along the walls against which to lean.  There are ranges above ranges of walks, connected by stairways cut into the solid rock, each range covered with lolling soldiers.  You pass so near that you can hear them chattering together.  Those on the topmost parapet, dangling their blue woolen legs over, are so high and so directly overhead that they remind you of flies on the ceiling.

In various places small niches have been excavated in the cliff, some with crucifixes, or figures of saints, and in other places the bare, unbroken wall of rock runs up, sheer straight 100 feet.  Below, on the ocean side, are caves, deep, dark and uncanny, worn deep into the rock.  Some of them are so extensive that they have not been explored in generations.

The broad and lofty entrances to one of them, hollowed by the encroaching sea, is as perfect an arch as could be drawn by a skillful architect, and with it a tradition is connected which dates back a couple of centuries.  A story or two above these wave-eaten caverns are many small windows, each heavily barred with iron.  They are dungeons dug into the solid rock, and over them might well be written, “Leave hope behind, ye who enter here!” A crowd of haggard, pallid faces are pressed against the bars; and as you steam slowly by, so close that you might speak to the wretched