“I wouldn’t give much for your chances of coming back unboxed,” said the Captain to me, as the China steamed out from the Golden Gate on the twenty-five day voyage to Hong Kong via Honolulu and Yokohama.

“That’s God’s country we’re leaving behind, sure enough,” said he, “and you’ll find it out after a week or two in the Philippines. There’s Howe came back with us last trip from there; almost shuffled off on the way. Spent half a year in Manila with small-pox, fever, snakes, typhoons, and earthquakes, and had to be carried aboard ship at Hong Kong and off at ’Frisco. Guess he’s about done for all right.”

And as Howe happened to be the unfortunate whose place in Manila I was going to take, you know, I heeded the skipper’s advice and looked with more fervor on God’s country than I had for some days. For it was a dusty trip across country from Boston on the Pacific express; and because babies are my pet aversion every mother’s son of them aboard the train was quartered in my car—three families moving West to grow up with the country, and all of them occupying the three sections nearest mine. I got so weary of the five cooing, coughing, crying “clouds-of-glory-trailers,” that it seemed a relief at San Francisco to wash off the dust of the Middle West and get aboard the P.M.S. Company’s steamer China bound for the far East.

But the Captain, like the whistle, was somewhat of a blower, and liked to make me and the missionaries aboard feel we were leaving behind all that was desirable. And how he bothered the twoscore or more of them bound for the up-river ports of Middle China! When, after leaving the Sandwich Islands, the voyage had proceeded far enough for everybody on the passenger-list to get fairly well acquainted with his neighbors, these spreaders of the gospel followed the custom established by their predecessors and made plans for a Sunday missionary service. Without so much as asking leave of the skipper, they posted in the companion-way the following notice:

But they counted without their host. The Captain had never schooled himself to look on missionaries with favor, and he accordingly made arrangements to cross the meridian where the circle of time changes and a day is dropped early on Sunday morning. He calculated to a nicety, and as the passengers came down to Sabbath breakfast they saw posted below the other notice, in big letters, the significant words:

In Yokohama and Hong Kong the wiseacres were free in saying they wouldn’t be found dead in Manila or the Philippines for anything. They had never been there, but knew all about it, and seemed ready to wave any one bound thither a sort of never’ll-see-you-again farewell that was most affecting. It is these very people that have made Manila the side-tracked capital that it is and have scared off globe-trotters from making it a visit on their way to the Straits of Malacca and India.

Hong Kong, the end of the China’s outward run, bursts into view after a narrow gateway, between inhospitable cliffs, lets the steamer into a great bay which is the centre of admiration for bleak mountain-ranges. The city, with its epidemic of arcaded balconies, lies along the water to the left and goes stepping up the steep slopes to the peak behind, on whose summit the signal-flags announce our arrival. The China has scarcely a chance to come to anchor in peace before a storm of sampans bite her sides like mosquitoes, and hundreds of Chinawomen come hustling up to secure your trade, while their lazy husbands stay below and smoke.

Hong Kong rather feels as if it were the “central exchange” for the Far East, and from the looks of things I judge it is. The great bay is full of deep-water ships, the quays teem with life, and the streets are full of quiet bustle. It is quite enough to give one heart disease to shin up the hills to the residence part of the town, and it took me some time to find breath enough to tell the Spanish Consul I wanted him to visÉ my passport to Manila.

This interesting stronghold of Old England in the East is fertile in descriptive matter by the wholesale, but I can’t rob my friends in the Philippines of more space than enough to chronicle the doings of a Chinese tailor who made me up my first suit of thin tweeds. Ripping off the broad margin to the Hong Kong Daily Press, he stood me on a box, took my measure with his strip of paper, making sundry little tears along its length, according as it represented length of sleeve or breadth of chest, and sent me off with a placid “Me makee allee same plopper tree day; no fittee no takee.” And I’m bound to say that the thin suits Tak Cheong built for $6 apiece, from nothing but the piece of paper full of tears, fit to far greater perfection than the system of measurement would seem to have warranted.

The voyage from Hong Kong to Manila, 700 miles to the southeast, is one of the worst short ocean-crossings in existence, and the Esmeralda, Captain Tayler, as she went aslant the seas rolling down from Japan, in front of the northeast monsoon, developed such a corkscrew motion that I fear it will take a return trip against the other monsoon to untwist the feelings of her passengers. On the morning of the second day, however, the yawing ceased; the skipper said we were under the lee of Luzon, the largest and most northern island of the Philippines, and not long after the high mountains of the shore-range loomed up off the port bow. From then on our chunky craft of 1,000 tons steamed closer to the coast and turned headland after headland as she poked south through schools of flying-fish and porpoises.

By afternoon the light-house on Corregidor appeared, and with a big sweep to the left the Esmeralda entered the Boca Chica, or narrow mouth to Manila Bay. On the left, the coast mountains sloped steeply up for some 5,000 feet, while on the right the island of Corregidor, with its more moderate altitude, stood planted in the twelve-mile opening to worry the tides that swept in and out from the China Sea. Beyond lay the Boca Grande, or wide mouth used by ships coming from the south or going thither, and still beyond again rose the lower mountains of the south coast. In front the Bay opened with a grand sweep right and left, till the shore was lost in waves of warm air, and only the dim blue of distant mountains showed where the opposite perimeter of the great circle might be located.

It was twenty-seven miles across the bay, and the sun had set with a wealth of color in the opening behind us before we came to anchor amid a fleet of ships and steamers off a low-lying shore that showed many lights in long rows. Next morning Manila lay visibly before us, but failed to convey much idea of its size, from the fact that it stretched far back on the low land, thus permitting the eye to see only the front line of buildings and a few taller and more distant church-steeples. Not far in the background rose a high range of velvet-like looking mountains whose tops aspired to show themselves above the clouds, and on the right and left stretched flanking ranges of lower altitude.

In due season my colleague came off to the anchorage in a small launch, and we were soon steaming back up a narrow river thickly fringed with small ships, steamers, houses, quays, and people. It was piping hot at the low custom-house on the quay. Panting carabao—the oxen of the East—tried to find shade under a parcel of bamboos, shaggy goats nosed about for stray bits of crude sugar dropped from bags being discharged by coolies, piles of machinery were lying around promiscuously dumped into the deep mud of the outyards, natives with bared backs gleaming in the sun were lugging hemp or prying open boxes, and under-officials with sharp rods were probing flour-sacks in the search for contraband. Spanish officials in full uniform, smoking cigarettes, playing chess, and fanning themselves in their comfortable seats in bent-wood rocking-chairs, were interrupted by our arrival, and made one boil within as they upset the baggage and searched for smuggled dollars.

Here, then, was the anti-climax to the long journey of forty days from Boston, and those were the moments in which to realize the meaning of the expression made by the Captain of the China as she left the Golden Gate: “Take a last look, for you’re leaving behind God’s country.”

Before arrival, while yet the Esmeralda was steaming down the coast, I was resolved to refrain from judging Manila by first impressions. I felt primed for anything, and was bound to be neither surprised nor disappointed. At first, I may admit, my chin and collar drooped, but on meeting with my new associate I gave them a mental starching and stepped with courage into the rickety barouche that, drawn by two small and bony ponies, took us to the office of Henry W. Peabody & Co., the only American house in the Philippines.

And having entered the two upstair rooms, that looked out over the little Plaza de Cervantes, I was introduced to bamboo chairs, a quartette of desks, and half a dozen office-boys, who were rudely awakened from their morning’s slumber by the scuffle of my heavy boots on the broad, black planks of the shining floors. Across the larger room, suspended from the ceiling, hung the big “punka,” which seems to form a most important article of furniture in every tropical establishment. On my arrival the boy who pulled the string got down to work, and amid the sea-breezes that blew the morning’s mail about, business of the day began.

The first thing I noticed was that cloth instead of plaster formed the walls and ceilings, and seemed far less likely than the mixture of lime and water to fall into baby’s crib or onto the dinner-table during those terrestrial or celestial exhibitions for which Manila is famous. For the Philippines are said to be the cradle of earthquake and typhoon, and in buildings, everywhere, construction seems to conform to the requirements of these much-respected “movers.” Tiles on roofs, they say, are now forbidden, since the passers-by below are not willing to wear brass helmets or carry steel umbrellas to ward off a shower of those missiles started by a heavy shake. Galvanized iron is used instead, and, while detracting from the picturesque, has added to the security of households who once used to be rudely awakened from their slumbers by the extra weight of tile bedspreads.

And Manila houses. Down in the town, outside the city walls, the regular, or rather irregular, Spanish type prevails, and nature, in her nervousness, seems to have done much in dispensing with lines horizontal and perpendicular. The buildings all have an appearance of feebleness and senility, and look as if a good blow or a heavy shake would lay them flat. But in the old city, behind the fortifications, are heavy buttressed buildings of by-gone days, built when it was thought that earthquakes respected thick walls rather than thin, and the sturdy buttresses so occupy the narrow sidewalks that pedestrians must travel single file. The Spanish—so it seems—rejoice to huddle together in these gloomy houses of Manila proper, but the rich natives, half-castes, and foreigners all prefer the newer villas outside the narrow streets and musty walls; and just as much as the Anglo-Saxon likes to place a grass-plot or a garden between him and the thoroughfare in front of his residence, so does the Spaniard seek to hug close to the street, and even builds his house to overhang the sidewalk. Save for carriages and dogs, the lower floors of city houses are generally deserted, and, on account of fevers that hang about in the mists of the low-ground, everyone takes to living on the upper story. Balconies, which are so elaborate that they carry the whole upper part of the house out over the sidewalk, are a conspicuous feature in all the buildings of older construction, and with their engaging overhang afford opportunities for leaning out to talk with passers-by below, or a convenient vantage-ground from which to throw the waste water from wash-basins. Huge window-gratings thrust themselves forward from the walls of the lower story, and are often big enough to permit dogs and servants to sit in them and watch the pedestrians, who almost have to leave the sidewalk to get around these great cages.

It may be just as well, before going farther, to say something about this town that is sarcastically labelled “Pearl of the Orient” and “Venice of the Far East” by poets who have only seen the oyster-shell windows or back doors on the Pasig on the cover-labels of cigar-boxes. It seems big enough to supply me with the pianos and provisions which kind friends suggested I bring out with me in case of need, and the main street, Escolta, is as busy with life and as well fringed with shops as a Washington street or a Broadway.

Spanish, of course, is the court and commercial language and, except among the uneducated natives who have a lingo of their own or among the few members of the Anglo-Saxon colony—it has a monopoly everywhere. No one can really get on without it, and even the Chinese come in with their peculiar pidgin variety.

The city squats around its old friend the river Pasig, and shakes hands with itself in the several bridges that bind one side to the other. On the right bank of the river, coming in from the bay and passing up by the breakwater, lies the old walled town of Manila proper, whose weedy moats, ponderous drawbridges, and heavy gates suggest a troubled past. Old Manila may be figured as a triangle, a mile on a side, and the dingy walls seem, as it were, to herd in a drove of church-steeples, schools, houses, and streets. The river is the boundary on the north, and the wall at that side but takes up the quay which runs in from the breakwater and carries it up to the Puente de EspaÑa, the first bridge that has courage enough to span the yellow stream.

The front wall runs a mile to the south along the bay front, starting at the river in the old fort and battery that look down on the berth where the Esmeralda lies, and is separated from the beach only by an old moat and the promenade of the Malecon, which, also beginning at the river, runs to an open plaza called the Luneta, a mile up the beach. The east wall takes up the business at that point, and wobbles off at an angle again till it brings up at the river fortifications, just near where the Puente de EspaÑa, already spoken of, carries all the traffic across the Pasig. Thus the old city is cooped up like pool-balls, in a triangle three miles around, and the walls do as much in keeping out the wind as they do in keeping in the various unsavory odors that come from people who like garlic and don’t take baths. Here is the cathedral—a fine old church that cost a million of money and was widowed of its steeple in the earthquakes of the ’80s—and besides a lot of smaller churches are convent schools, the city hall, army barracks, and a raft of private residences.

Opposite Old Manila, on the other bank, lies the business section, with the big quays lined with steamers and alive with movement. The custom-house and the foreign business community are close by the river-side, while in back are hundreds of narrow streets, store-houses, and shops that go to make up the stamping ground of the Chinese who control so large a part of the provincial trade.

Everything centres at the foot of the Puente de EspaÑa, which pours its perspiring flood into the narrow lane of the Escolta, and people, carriages, tram-cars, and dust all sail in here from north, east, south, and west. As on the other side, the busy part of the section runs a mile up and down the river and a mile back from it, while out or up beyond come the earlier residential suburbs. In Old Manila, the Church seems to rule, but on this side the Pasig the State makes itself felt, from the custom-house to the governor’s palace—a couple of miles up stream.

As to population, Manila, in the larger sense, may hold 350,000 souls, besides a few dogs. Of the lot, call 50,000 Chinese, 5,000 Spaniards, 150 Germans, 90 English, and 4 Americans. The rest are natives or half-castes of the Malay type, whose blood runs in all mixtures of Chinese, Spanish, and what-not proportions, and whose Chinese eyes, flat noses, and high cheek-bones are queer accompaniments to their Spanish accents. Thus the majority of the souls in Manila,—like the dogs—are mongrels, or mestizos, as the word is, and the saying goes that happy is the man who knows his own father.

I spent my first night in Manila at the Spanish Hotel El Oriente, and it was here that I became acquainted with that peculiar institution, the Philippine bed. And to the newly arrived traveller its peculiar rig and construction make it command a good deal of interest, if not respect. It is a four-poster, with the posts extending high enough to support a light roof, from whose eaves hang copious folds of deep lace. The bed-frame is strung tightly across with regular chair-bottom cane, and the only other fittings are a piece of straw matting spread over the cane, a pillow, and a surrounding wall of mosquito-netting that drops down from the roof and is tucked in under the matting. How to get into one of these cages was the first question that presented itself, and what to do with myself after I got in was the second. It took at least half an hour to make up my mind as to the proper mode of entrance, when I was for the first time alone with this Philippine curiosity, and I couldn’t make out whether it was proper to get in through the roof or the bottom or the side. After finally pulling away the netting, I found the hard cane bottom about as soft as the teak floor, and looked in vain for blankets, sheets, and mattresses. In fact, it seems as if I had gotten into an unfurnished house, and the more I thought about it the longer I stayed awake. At last I cut my way out of the peculiar arrangement, dressed, and spent the decidedly cool night in a long cane chair, preferring not to experiment further with the sleeping-machine until I found out how it worked.

Next morning my breakfast was brought up by a native boy, and consisted of a cup of thick chocolate, a clammy roll, and a sort of seed-cake without any hole in it. How to drink the chocolate, which was as thick as molasses, seemed the chief question, but I rightly concluded that the seed-cake was put there to sop it out of the cup, after the fashion of blotting-paper. Fortified with this peculiar combination, I started on my second business day by trying to remember in what direction the office lay, and wandered cityward through busy streets, often bordered with arcaded sidewalks, which were further shaded from the sun by canvas curtains.

After beginning the morning by ordering a dozen suits of white sheeting from a native tailor—price $2.50 apiece—I was introduced to the members of the English Club, and began to feel more at home stretched out in one of the long chairs in the cool library. It seems that the club affords shelter and refreshment to its fourscore members at two widely separated points of the compass, one just on the banks of the Pasig River, where its waters, slouching down from the big lake at the foot of the mountains, are first introduced to the outlying suburbs of the city, and the other in the heart of the business section. The same set of native servants do for both departments, since no one stays uptown during the middle of the day and no one downtown after business hours. As a result, on week-days, after the light breakfast of the early morning is over at the uptown building, the staff of waiters and assistants hurry downtown in the tram-cars and make ready for the noon meal at the other structure, returning home to the suburbs in time to officiate at dinner.

At the downtown club is the 6,000-volume library, and after the noonday tiffin it is always customary to stretch out in one of the long bamboo chairs and read one’s self to sleep. This is indeed a land where laziness becomes second nature. If you want a book or paper on the table, and they lie more than a yard or two from where you are located, it is not policy to reach for them. O, no! You ring a bell twice as far off, take a nap while the boy comes from a distance, and wake up to find him handing you them with a graceful “AquÍ, SeÑor!” In fact, I have even just now met an English fellow who, they tell me, took a barber with him on a recent trip to the southern provinces, to look after his scanty beard that was composed of no more than three or four dozen hairs, each of which grew one-eighth of an inch quarterly.

On the day before Christmas one of the guest-rooms at the uptown club was vacated, and I moved in. The building is about two and a half miles out of the city, and its broad balcony, shaded by luxuriant palms and other tropical trees, almost overhangs the main river that splits Manila in two. The view from this tropical piazza is most peaceful. Opposite lie the rice-fields, with a cluster of native huts surrounding an old church, while, blue in the distance, sleeps a range of low mountains. To the left the river winds back up-country and soon loses itself in many turns among the foothills that later grow into the more adult uplifts on the Pacific Coast, while to the right it turns a sharp corner and slides down between broken rows of native huts and more elaborate bungalows.

The club-house is long, low, and rambling. The reading, writing, and music rooms front on the river, and the glossy hard-wood floors, hand-hewn out of solid trees, seem to suggest music and coolness. It is possible to reach the city by jumping into a native boat at the portico on the river bank, or to go by one of the two-wheel gigs, called carromatas, waiting at the front gate, or to walk a block and take the tram-car which jogs down through the busy highroad.

It is very difficult to absorb the points of so large a place at one’s first introduction, so I won’t go further now than to speak of that far-famed seaside promenade called the Luneta, where society takes its airing after the heat of the day is over.

Imagine an elliptical plaza, about a thousand feet long, situated just above the low beach which borders the Bay, and looking over toward the China Sea. Running around its edge is a broad roadway, bounded on one side by the sea-wall, and on the other by the green fields and bamboo-trees of the parade-grounds. In the centre of the raised ellipse is the band-stand, and on every afternoon, from six to eight, all Manila come here to feel the breeze, hear the music, and see their neighbors. Hundreds of carriages line the roadways, and mounted police keep them in proper file. The movement is from right to left, and only the Archbishop and the Governor-General are allowed to drive in the opposite direction.

The gentler element, in order not to encourage a flow of perspiration that may melt off their complexions, take to carriages, but the sterner sex prefer to walk up and down, crowd around the band-stand, or sit along the edge of the curbing in chairs rented for a couple of coppers. Directly in front lies the great Bay, with the sun going down in the Boca Chica, between the hardly visible island of Corregidor and the main land, thirty miles away. To the rear stretches the parade-ground, backed up by clumps of bamboos and the distant mountains beyond. To the right lie the corner batteries and walls of Old Manila, and to the left the attractive suburb of Ermita, with the stretch of shore running along toward the naval station of CavitÉ, eleven miles away. To take a chair, watch the people walking to and fro, and see the endless stream of smart turn-outs passing in slow procession; to hear a band of fifty pieces render popular and classic music with the spirit of a Sousa or a Reeves, is to doubt that you are in a capital 8,000 miles from Paris and 11,000 miles from New York. Footmen with tall hats, in spotless white uniforms, grace the box-seats of the low-built victorias, while tastefully dressed Spanish women or wealthy half-castes recline against the soft cushions and take for granted the admiration of those walking up and down the mall.

The splendidly trained artillery-band, composed entirely of natives, but conducted by a Spaniard, plays half a dozen selections each evening, and here is a treat that one can have every afternoon of the year, free of charge. There are no snow-drifts or cold winds to mar the performance, and, except during the showers and winds of the rainy season, it goes on without interruption.

After the music is over the carriages rush off in every direction, behind smart-stepping little ponies that get over the ground at a tremendous pace, and the dinner-hour is late enough not to rob one of those pleasant hours at just about sunset. There are no horses in Manila—all ponies, and some of them are so small as to be actually insignificant. They are tremendously tough little beasts, however, and stand more heat, work, and beating than most horses of twice their size.

Our Christmas dinner at the club has just ended, and from the bill of fare one would never suspect he was not at the Waldorf or the Parker House. Long punkas swung to and fro over the big tables, small serving boys in bare feet rushed hither and thither with meat and drink, corks popped, the smart breeze blew jokes about, and everyone unbent. Soups, fish, joints, entrÉes, rÉmoves, hors-d’oeuvres, mince-pies, plum-puddings, and all the delicacies to be found in cooler climes had their turn, as did a variety of liquid courses. Singing, speeches, and music followed the more material things, and everyone was requested to take some part in the performance. By the time the show was over the piano was dead-beat and everybody hoarse from singing by the wrong method.