e for quadrupeds, and locomotion
on the streets 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