Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/583

 560 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS were consumed on one funeral pyre. It was slow and nasty work. A week passed before any decided change could be noticed. After the human bodies had been gathered and burned. General Wood turned his attention to the animal carcasses and filth in the streets, and then to a more strict inspection of the houses. Santiago houses, instead of being built with front yards, have square enclosures or courtyards, and the uncleaned cesspools in the centers of these were springs of sickness. Property owners were ordered to clean them under penalty, and to report all conditions of undean- liness to the headquarters of their districts. Corrosive sub- limate was used plentifully, and slowly and gradually it be- came more easy for a person to live within the dty-limits without accumulating countless germs of typhoid, yellow- fever, or other virulent maladies. No provisions had ever been made for carrying oflf the city's refuse, and its removal had been left to natural drain- age and the vultures. Santiago is built on a sort of ridge. Garbage was thrown out into the streets and, when the rains came, allowed to wash down onto the beach where it lay rot- ting until devoured by the birds. General Wood ordered householders to prepare their garbage daily to be hauled away by wagons. At the end of a month or so he had succeeded in enlisting the partial cooperation of residents in the work of sanitation — what with appeals to common sense and jail sentences to the obdurate, who preferred familiar smells to the odor of chloride of lime. Prisoners from the jails had occasionally in times past been forced to sweep the square around the palace ; that is as much of a street cleaning system as Santiago had ever had. The streets were narrow, crooked lanes, which became rivers of mud in the rainy season. General Wood put all idle Cubans he could find to work on paving the streets in an up-to-date manner, paying each man fifty cents a day and board. In the vermin-ridden holes that served as jails General Wood found hordes of creatures incarcerated, against whom only the flimsiest charges could be found. He passed a rule that no man should be held in jail over forty-eight hours with-