Then we entered the Strait of San Bernardino, between Luzon and Samar, and passed for a day through a region of isles.  The sea was glassy save when a school of porpoises tore it apart in their pursuit of the flying fish.  On its deep sapphire the islands seemed to float, sometimes a mere pinnacle of rock, sometimes a cone-shaped peak timbered down to the beach where the surf fell over.  Toward evening, when the breeze freshened slightly, we seemed almost to brush the sides of some of these islets, and they invited us with sparkling pools and coves, with beaches over which the sea wimpled, and with grassy hillsides running out into promontories above cliffs of volcanic rock.  Thatched villages nestled in the clefts of the larger islands, or a fleet of paraos might be drawn up in a curving bay.  And, yonder in the golden west, shimmering, dancing, in rosy-tinted splendor, more islands beckoned us to the final glory of a matchless day—­clouds heaped on clouds, outlined in thin threads of gold, and drawing, in broad shafts of smoky flame, the vapors of an opal sea.  At that time I had not seen the famous Inland Sea of Japan, but I have since passed through it twice, and feel that in beauty the Strait of San Bernardino has little to yield to her far-famed neighbor.

Next day we crept up the coast of Batangas, and when I came on deck the second morning they told me that the island on our left was Corregidor, and that Manila was three hours’ sail ahead.  It was of no use going into a trance and coming up in imagination with Dewey, because he did not come our way.  The entrance to Manila Bay is rather narrow, and Corregidor lies a little to one side in it like a stone blocking a doorway.  The passage on the left entering the bay is called Boca Chica, or Little Mouth; that to the right is called Boca Grande, or Big Mouth.  Dewey entered by the Boca Chica, and we were in Boca Grande.

By and by a cluster of roofs, church towers, docks, and arsenals took form against the sea.  A little later we could discern the hulks of the Spanish fleet scattered in the water, and several of our own fighting craft at anchor.  This was Cavite.  There, too, around a great curve of eight or nine miles, lay Manila, a mass of towers, domes, and white-painted iron roofs peeping out of green.  Behind loomed the background of mountains, without which no Filipino landscape is ever complete.

By eleven o’clock we had dropped anchor and the long voyage was over.  Counting our ten days in Honolulu, we lacked but three of the forty days and forty nights in which the Lord fasted in the wilds.  It would be injustice to the Buford’s well-filled larder, however, to intimate that we fasted.  Our food was good, barring the ice cream, which the chef had a weakness for flavoring with rose water.