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encountered before; the waves beat angrily against our bow; the ship, which had been so quiet and so still in the noonday heat, now shivered like an aspen leaf, and then sprang ahead. I rubbed my eyes; I seemed to be dreaming, but only for a moment. It was not too deep a secret for even a landsman to fathom; the very highest possible pressure of steam had been applied to all our boilers; we were going ahead at the highest possible speed. Soon, with the glass, we descried the object of our chase—a dark-hulled, low-lying vessel, coming along the Cuban coast. A moment later the excitement which now possessed every man on board reached fever heat when the word came down from the bridge that the strange vessel steaming for Havana was a man-of-war, a first-class armored cruiser, probably the "Vizcaya," which had given the watchers in Cape Verde the slip. In a moment, in the minds of the 550 men on board, this possibility had deepened into a probability, and in two minutes it had become a certainty—a dead sure thing — the "New York" was going to fight the "Vizcaya." The "New York" had such "dumb luck" was the gratified opinion heard on all sides. The bugle sounded to general quarters, and the men sprang to their guns like lovers impatient to keep their tryst. My particular chum, the gun captain of the forward turret, wound his arms about the brazen cheeks of his two eight-inch pets, "General Ulysses S. Grant" and "Robert E. Lee," and fondled them as though they were the heads of flaxen-haired and rosy-cheeked children.

Before we sailed, the wood and the brass work had all been cut away, and now even the life lines and the stanchions which surrounded the cleared decks were removed. The battle hatches, great pieces of flat sheet iron, were placed and battened down over the airshafts, and the three remaining boats that we carried were drawn in close amidships and covered with damp canvas, so that if struck by the enemy's fire their splinters might be contained within a reasonable area. Two pale men, with their eyes blinking under

THE "CUSHING" GOING IN CLOSE TO HAVANA TO RECONNOITER.

the, to them, unusual glare of the sun, were brought up now from the brig, where they had been imprisoned for some infraction of discipline. The captain spoke to them, before the mast, a few kindly, earnest words, and then they sprang each man to his division and his post, with a cheerful, "Aye, aye, sir, we will." The fleet surgeon walked the deck, flanked by his assistants. "I have concluded," he said, "that we must be content with giving only the first aid to the injured wherever they may fall. Now, wherever that may be, they will be just as safe as anywhere else; there is no sweet berth for the surgeon's cockpit nowadays. Should we sheer off, or there be a lull in the fight, we will drop them below by means of canvas slides down the hatches." And in a minute the canvas slides were triced up and in readiness.

To our excited gaze the chase was making desperate efforts to reach Havana, but in this direction we were confident of being able to cut her down. Then the saucy little "Wilmington" loomed up in the stranger man-of-war's wake, together with a torpedo boat, and so we saw that the chase was cornered. It was to be a fair fight, however; every man on board sang out for that. Everyman on board knew that the "Vizcaya" carried more guns and of heavier metal than the "New York;" but every man wanted to fight it out single-handed, and audibly expressed the hope that the Admiral would signal the torpedo boat and the "Wilmington" to mind their own business.