It was figured out that we were within a thousand miles of the continent, and were getting home.  When one has been to the Philippines, what’s a thousand miles or two!  “Hello, Captain Seabury!  It is only about a thousand miles right ahead to the land.  You know what land it is, don’t you?  Well, now, you may break the shaft or burst the boilers, fling the ship to the sperm whales, like the one that was the only living thing we saw since Japan entered into the American clouds of the West.  We are only a thousand miles away from the solid, sugary sweet, redolent, ripe American soil, and if there is anything the matter we do not mind, why we will just take a boat and pull ashore.”  But we would have had a hard time if the Captain had taken us up in the flush of the hilarity that laughed at a thousand miles, when the breeze brought us the faint first hints that we were almost home, after a voyage of five thousand leagues.  The wind shifted to the south and increased until it roared, and the waves were as iron tipped with blue and silver, hurling their salty crests over our towering ship; and we were in the grasp—­

On the Pacific of the terrific
Storm King of the Equinox.

Mr. Longfellow mentioned the storm wind gigantic, that shook the Atlantic at the time of the equinox—­the one that urges the boiling surges bearing seaweed from the rocks; and all those disappointed because they had not bounded on the billows of the briny enough for healthy exercises, were satisfied in the reception by the tremendous Pacific when nigh the shore, which was once the western boundary, but is so no more, of that blessed America, of which her sons grow fonder the farther they roam.  God’s country, as the boys and girls call it reverently, when they are sailing the seas, was veiled from us in a fog that blanketed the deep.  For five thousand miles our ship had been in a remorseless solitude.  No voice had come to us; no spark of intelligence from the universe touched us, save from the stars and the sun, but at the hour of the night, and the point of the compass, our navigator had foretold, we should hear the deep-throated horn on Reyes point—­it came to us out of the gloomy abyss—­and science had not failed.  Across the trackless waste we had been guided aright, and there was music the angels might have envied in the hoarse notes of the fog-horn that welcomed the wanderers home.

CHAPTER XXIV

Our Picture Gallery.

Annotations and Illustrations—­Portraits of Heroes of the War in the Army and Navy, and of the Highest Public Responsibilities—­Admirals and Generals, the President and Cabinet—­Photographs of Scenes and Incidents—­The Characteristics of the Filipinos—­Their Homes, Dresses and Peculiarities in Sun Pictures—­The Picturesque People of Our New Possessions.