or in the boats is swift and sure.  I had an address to find in the city, on a tip at Manila of the presence, of a literary treasure, and my chairmen carried me, in a few minutes, to a tall house on a tall terrace, and the works of a martyr to liberty in the Philippines were located.  The penalty for the possession of these books in Manila was that of the author executed by shooting in the back in the presence of a crowd of spectators.  The cost of the carriers was thirty cents in silver—­fifteen cents in United States money—­and the men were as keen-eyed as they were sure-footed, and the strength of their tawny limbs called for admiration.  They were not burdened with clothes, and the play of the muscles of their legs was like a mechanism of steel, oiled, precise, easy and ample in force.  The China took on a few hundred tons of coal, which was delivered aboard from heavy boats by the basketful, the men forming a line, and so expert were they at each delivery, the baskets were passed, each containing about half a bushel—­perhaps there were sixty baskets to the ton—­at the rate of thirty-five baskets in a minute.  Make due allowances and one gang would deliver twenty tons of coal an hour.  The China was anchored three-quarters of a mile from the landing, and a boat ride was ten cents, or fifteen if you were a tipster.  The boats are, as a rule, managed by a man and his wife; and, as it is their own, they keep the children at home.  The average families on the boats—­and I made several counts—­were nine, the seven children varying from one to twelve years of age.  The vitality of the Chinese is not exhausted, or even impaired.

CHAPTER XXIII

Kodak Snapped at Japan.

Glimpses of China and Japan on the Way Home from the Philippines—­Hongkong a Greater Gibraltar—­Coaling the China—­Gangs of Women Coaling the China—­How the Japanese Make Gardens of the Mountains—­Transition from the Tropics to the Northern Seas—­A Breeze from Siberia—­A Thousand Miles Nothing on the Pacific—­Talk of Swimming Ashore.

Formosa was so far away eastward—­a crinkled line drawn faintly with a fine blue pencil, showing as an artistic scrawl on the canvass of the low clouds—­we could hardly claim when the sketch of the distant land faded from view, that we had seen Japan.  When Hongkong, of sparkling memory, was lost to sight, the guardian walls that secluded her harbor, closing their gates as we turned away, and the headlands of the celestial empire grew dim, a rosy sunset promised that the next day should be pleasant, our thoughts turned with the prow of the China to Japan.  We were bound for Nagasaki, to get a full supply of coal to drive us across the Pacific, having but twelve hundred tons aboard, and half of that wanted for ballast.  It was at the mouth of the harbor of Nagasaki that there was a settlement of Dutch Christians for some hundreds of years.  An indiscreet letter captured