Six months after, these two men, sitting at a camp-fire of
the Cuban army, read from a discolored newspaper, brought ashore with
the last supplies, the following:
"By cable to the 'Herald.'
"CADIZ, March 13, 1895.--Anxiety for the safety of the _Reina Regente_
has grown rapidly to-day, and this evening it is feared, generally,
that she went down with her four hundred and twenty souls in the storm
which swept the southern coast on Sunday night and Monday morning.
Despatches from Gibraltar say that pieces of a boat and several
semaphore flags belonging to the cruiser came ashore at Ceuta and
Tarifa this afternoon."
THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS*
From "South Sea Tales," BY JACK LONDON
*Reprinted by courtesy of the Macmillan Co.
There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of
islands. On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But
to the new chum who has no constitutional understanding of men and life
in the rough, the Solomons may indeed prove terrible.
It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about,
that loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a
poison that bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants
malignant ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there
return as wrecks to their own countries.
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