"Some delay; actually on board and steam up.

"Waiting--waiting--waiting. It's bad enough to go to Cuba in boats
like these, but to lie around for days is trying. No one goes
ashore, and I can hear nothing of brother. I wonder why the General
didn't give him that commission instead of me. There is a curious
sort of fellow here, who says he knows brother. His name is
Blackford, and he is very kind to me. He used to be a regular, and
he says he thinks brother took his place in the --th and is a
regular now himself--a private; I don't understand. There is mighty
little Rough Riding about this.

"P. S.--My bunkie is from Boston--Bob Sumner. His father commanded
a negro regiment in a fight once against my father; think of it!

"Hurrah! we're off."

It was a tropical holiday--that sail down to Cuba--a strange, huge
pleasure-trip of steamships, sailing in a lordly column of three; at
night, sailing always, it seemed, in a harbour of brilliant lights under
multitudinous stars and over thickly sown beds of tiny phosphorescent
stars that were blown about like flowers in a wind-storm by the frothing
wake of the ships; by day, through a brilliant sunlit sea, a cool
breeze--so cool that only at noon was the heat tropical--and over smooth
water, blue as sapphire. Music night and morning, on each ship, and
music coming across the little waves at any hour from the ships about.
Porpoises frisking at the bows and chasing each other in a circle around
bow and stern as though the transports sat motionless; schools of
flying-fish with filmy, rainbow wings rising from one wave and
shimmering through the sunlight to the foamy crest of another--sometimes
hundreds of yards away. Beautiful clear sunsets of rose, gold-green, and
crimson, with one big, pure radiant star ever like a censor over them;
every night the stars more deeply and thickly sown and growing ever
softer and more brilliant as the boats neared the tropics; every day
dawn rich with beauty and richer for the dewy memories of the dawns that
were left behind.