case, there were uncertainties as to directions.  The rain narrowed observation like a dense fog, and there was danger of running upon some of the islands and snags of rocks.  The battered vessel pulled through a cripple, with her boats shattered, her deck cracked across by a roller, and her crew were happy to find a quiet place to be put in order.  “To be or not to be” an American instead of a Spanish or Asiatic city was the parting thought as the China left Manila Bay, and the dark rocks of Corrigedor faded behind us, and the rugged rocks that confront the stormy sea loomed on our right, and the violet peaks of volcanic mountains bounded our eastern horizon.  The last view we had of the historic bay, a big German warship was close to the sentinel rock, that the Spaniards thought they had fortified, until Dewey came and saw and conquered, swifter than Caesar, and the Germans, venturing some target practice, by permission of Dewey, who relaxes no vigilance of authority.  Hongkong is 628 miles from Manila, and the waters so often stirred in monstrous wrath, welcomed us with a spread of dazzling silk.  The clumsy junks that appeared to have come down from the days of Confucius, were languid on the gentle ripples.  The outstanding Asian islands, small and grim, are singularly desolate, barren as if splintered by fire, gaunt and forbidding.  Hongkong is an island that prospers under the paws of the British lion, and it is a city displayed on a mountain side, that by day is not much more imposing than the town of Gibraltar, which it resembles, but at night the lights glitter in a sweeping circle, the steep ascent of the streets revealed by many lamps, and here and there the illumination climbs to the tops of the mountains that are revealed with magical efforts of color and form.  The harbor is entered by an ample, but crooked channel, and is land-locked, fenced with gigantic bumps that sketch the horizon, and with their heads and shoulders are familiar with the sky.  Here General Merritt, with his personal staff, left us, and between those bound from this port east and west, we circumnavigated the earth.

Mr. Poultney Bigelow, of Harper’s Weekly, who dropped in by the way just to make a few calls at Manila, and has a commission to explore the rivers and lagoons of China with his canoe, left us, in that surprising craft, plying his paddle in the fashion of the Esquimaux, pulling right and left, hand over hand, balancing to a nicety on the waves and going ashore dry and unruffled, with his fieldglass and portfolio, his haversack and typewriter machine that he folds in a small box as if it was a pocket comb, and his kodak, with which he is an expert.  He has not only ransacked with his canoe the rivers of America, but has descended the Danube and the Volga.  He puts out in his canoe and crosses arms of the sea, as a pastime, makes a tent of his boat if it rains, fighting the desperadoes of all climes with the superstition, for which he is indebted to their imagination for his