elcomed us with a spread of dazzling silk. The clumsy junks that
appeared to have come down from the days of Confucius, were languid
on the gentle ripples. The outstanding Asian islands, small and grim,
are singularly desolate, barren as if splintered by fire, gaunt and
forbidding. Hongkong is an island that prospers under the paws of
the British lion, and it is a city displayed on a mountain side,
that by day is not much more imposing than the town of Gibraltar,
which it resembles, but at night the lights glitter in a sweeping
circle, the steep ascent of the streets revealed by many lamps, and
here and there the illumination climbs to the tops of the mountains
that are revealed with magical efforts of color and form. The harbor
is entered by an ample, but crooked channel, and is land-locked,
fenced with gigantic bumps that sketch the horizon, and with their
heads and shoulders are familiar with the sky. Here General Merritt,
with his personal staff, left us, and between those bound from this
port east and west, we circumnavigated the earth.

Mr. Poultney Bigelow, of Harper's Weekly, who dropped in by the way
just to make a few calls at Manila, and has a commission to explore
the rivers and lagoons of China with his canoe, left us, in that
surprising craft, plying his paddle in the fashion of the Esquimaux,
pulling right and left, hand over hand, balancing to a nicety on the
waves and going ashore dry and unruffled, with his fieldglass and
portfolio, his haversack and typewriter machine that he folds in a
small box as if it was a pocket comb, and his kodak, with which he
is an expert. He has not only ransacked with his canoe the rivers of
America, but has descended the Danube and the Volga. He puts out in
his canoe and crosses arms of the sea, as a pastime, makes a tent of
his boat if it rains, fighting the desperadoes of all climes with the
superstition, for which he is indebted to their imagination for his
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