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Points of Pictures

Sugar Plantation--Tobacco Fields--Royal Palms--Cocoanut Palms--Cuban Vegetation--Moro Castle Cell--Valley of the Yumuri--Santiago--Royal Family--The Object Lesson of Cuba and Long Island Contrasted on the Scale as to Size--The Spanish Hill-top and Car Fortifications--Cuban Pictures too Beautiful to Paint, Except with a Poetic Pen.

The Spaniards have had a laborious year and a quarter since the war that continues broke out. They have cut many roads through jungles and constructed barricades and excavated ditches, and they have built two thousand forts for the shelter of their petty garrisons, that they may be able to stand a siege and beat off bands of insurgents in superior numbers. These forts are structures impervious by rifle shots, and are loop-holed. They are provided with water supply and food and cartridges for a few days, and in them the Spanish guards are enabled to avoid malaria and partake of their scanty rations in comparative comfort and be right in the way of hindering the roving columns of the rebels.

The forts are in commanding places, and have become a feature in the landscapes hardly second in conspicuity to the palm trees that forever dominate the scenery. The Spaniards in their snuggeries would be a forbidding feature over a vast extent of territory, if they were keen marksmen. With the range of a mile or two that the rifles with which the Spanish soldiers are provided, half a dozen sharp-shooters in a fort would be distracting hornets' nests, and have a wide-spread influence. The terrors of the system of minor fortifications are much mitigated by the fact that markmanship is an extraordinary accomplishment among the Spanish soldiery. The active Spaniards have also forts on car tracks for the protection of railroads. They take freight cars and plate them with iron, and loop-hole them, and place two or three with appropriate garrisons in the trains transporting troops and supplies. The insurgents have been bothered a good deal by these perambulating fortifications, but recently they have found out a way of beating the car forts, by waylaying them in railroad cuts, and firing through the unprotected roofs--a very disturbing ceremony. The map of Cuba that we give, showing the line of march of Gomez through the Island from east to west, of the insurgent forces, is contrasted with Long Island drawn on the same scale. The line of the march should, however, be projected two-thirds through Pinar del Rio.