Arrived at Iloilo, I was taken ill almost immediately with the prevailing tropical evil, dysentery, presumably the result of drinking spring water on the gold hunt.  At the same time there came down the report that cholera was epidemic in Manila.  Nevertheless, when I was able to travel, to Manila I went, and there loathed myself, for it was blistering hot.  I was staying at a hotel in the Walled City, and the great yellow placards announcing cholera were to be found on houses of almost all streets in the vicinity.  But when I was ready to leave, the full evil of a cholera epidemic made itself apparent.  There was no getting out of Manila without putting in five days’ quarantine in the bay.

We went aboard on the twenty-seventh of May.  The steamer pulled out into the bay and dropped anchor.  We were paying five pesos a day subsistence during this detention, and yet we were supplied with no ice and no fresh meat.  We consumed the inevitable goat, chicken, and garbanzos, the cheese, bananas, and guava jelly, and the same lukewarm coffee and lady-fingers for breakfast.  Owing to the heat, and the lack of fans, the staterooms were practically impossible, and everybody slept on deck either on a steamer chair or on an army cot.  The men took one side of the deck, and the women the other.  By day we yawned, slept, read, perspired, and looked longingly out at Manila dozing in the heat haze.  There were several Englishmen aboard, and they were supplied with a spirit kettle, a package of tea, some tins of biscuits, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of Cadbury’s sweets, which they dispensed generously every afternoon.  They had also a ping-pong outfit, and played.

Every day the doctor’s launch came out to see that none of us had escaped or developed cholera, and it brought us mail.  Decoration Day was heralded by the big guns from Fort Santiago and the fleet at Cavite, and as I recalled all the other Decoration Days of my memory, the unnaturalness of a Decoration Day in the Philippines became more and more apparent.

Our quarantine was up on Sunday morning, but at the eleventh hour it was noised about that we should not leave, because a lorcha which we had to tow had failed to get her clearance papers.  Our spirits descended into abysmal infinity.  We felt that we could not endure another twenty-four hours of inaction.

The lorcha was a dismasted hull, no more, with a Filipino family and one or two men aboard to steer.  We had a Scotch engineer who might have been the original of Kipling’s McFee.  I spoke to him about the rumor as he leaned over the side staring at the lorcha, and he gave vent to his feelings in a description of the general appearance of the lorcha in language too technically nautical for me to transcribe.  At the end he waxed mildly profane, and threatened to “pull the dom nose out of her” when once he got her outside of Corregidor.

The rumor proved a canard, however, and we lined up at eleven o’clock, while the doctor counted us to see that we were all alive and well.  Then up anchor and away, with the breeze born of motion cooling off the ship.