safety in running phenomenal hazards, that he is a magician.  Marco Polo was not so great a traveler or so rare an adventurer as Bigelow, and, having left Florida under a thunder cloud of the scowl of an angry army for untimely criticisms, he has invaded the celestial empire in his quaint canoe, and he can beat the Chinese boatmen on their own rivers, and sleep like a sea bird on the swells of green water, floating like a feather, and safe in his slumbers as a solon goose with his head under his wing.  However, he has not a winged boat, a bird afloat sailing round the purple peaks remote, as Buchanan Reed put it in his “Drifting” picture of the Vesuvian bay, for Bigelow uses a paddle.  There has been a good deal of curiosity as well as indignation about his papers on the handling of our Cuban expedition before it sailed, and it is possible he was guilty of the common fault of firing into the wrong people.  He was in Washington in June, and he and I meeting on the Bridge of Spain over the Pesang in Manila in August, we had, between us, put a girdle about the earth.  Some say such experiences are good to show how small the earth is, but I am more than ever persuaded that it is big enough to find mankind in occupation and subsistence until time shall be no more.  In the dock at Hongkong was Admiral Dewey’s flagship Olympia, and while she had the grass scratched from her bottom, the gallant crew were having a holiday with the zest that rewards those who for four months were steadily on shipboard with arduous cares and labors.  H.B.M.S.  Powerful, of 12,000 tons displacement, with four huge flues and two immense military masts, presided at Hongkong under orders to visit Manila.  The mingling of the English and Chinese in Hongkong is a lively object lesson, showing the extent of the British capacity to utilize Asiatic labor, and get the profit of European capital and discipline, an accumulation that requires an established sense of safety—­a justified confidence in permanency.

The contrast between the city of Hongkong and that of Manila is one that Americans should study now, to be instructed in the respective colonial systems of England and Spain.  Hongkong is clean and solid, with business blocks of the best style of construction, the pavements excellent in material and keeping, shops full of goods, all the appliances of modern times—­a city up to date.  There are English enough to manage and Chinese enough to toil.  There are two British regiments, one of them from India, the rank and file recruited from the fighting tribes of northern mountaineers.  There are dark, tall men, with turbans, embodiment of mystery, and Parsees who have a strange spirituality of their own, and in material matters maintain a lofty code of honor, while their pastime is that of striving while they march to push their heads into the clouds.  There are no horses in Hongkong, the coolies carrying chairs on bamboo poles, or trotting with two-wheelers, an untiring substitute for quadrupeds, and locomotion on the streets