Trooper Tales — page 160: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

148 The Voice in the Fourth Cell. It will please you. No countenance could be vicious or ugly with such eyes. You will not wonder at the sunken cheeks, or at the drawn, bloodless lips, for all Spanish convicts slowly starve. Pass on, you must. Then in a moment, you will hear strains of weird, hushed melody. It is like the dream of a pure con- Science, so sweet, so ethereal, so appealing; close your eyes and you will see the great white moon, playing upon the turrets of Spanish castles. You care not to under- stand the words—so touching is the music from the cell of Juan Tosta. _ But we knew the Spanish singer, Silk Redmond and I, before he was starving in the dark cell of Manati prison. When his home was on the great White Cliffs, hanging over the curling, limpid Rio Grande, we met him. There is a Rio Grande in Porto Rico. It is distant from no- where on the island. Its water is the clearest in the world—like a mountain spring. Years before Juan Tosta was a slave. Because he was a Porto Rican those whose veins run with pure Castilian blood, would have called Juan a mon- grel. Strange to an American are these people—so mild and harmless are they. The finer feelings of life are not unknown to them. They live in a land the capabilities of which are incalculable, yet they die in their youth— die not from disease, but in the slow agony of wasting limbs, in the low fever of hunger unappeased. Centuries of oppression have made them a timid peo- ple. The rich Spanish planter was their master once. CORMICOOLK<S (C0)