r twenty-two days' steaming from San Francisco--Queen's Hospital
time not counted--we were directly south of China's Yellow Sea,
and within a few hours of sighting the isle of Luzon.

Only at Honolulu, all the way from San Francisco, was there a sail or a
smoke not of a vessel of the Philippine expedition. All the long days
and nights the eye swept the horizon for companionship, finding only
that of our associates in adventure, and very little of them. Even the
birds seem to shrink from the heart of the watery world spread between
America and Asia; and the monsters of the deep are absent. One day,
about a thousand miles from California, a story spread of a porpoise
at play, but the lonely creature passed astern like a bubble. Bryant
sang of the water fowl that flew from zone to zone, guided in certain
flight on the long way over which our steps are led aright, but the
Pacific zones are too broad for even winged wanderers. The fish that
swarm on our coast do not seem to find home life or sporting places
in this enormous sea. Only the flying fish disturb the silky scene and
flutter with silver wings over the sparkling laces that glisten where
the winds blow gently, and woo the billows to cast aside the terrors
of other climes and match the sky of blue and gold in beauty; but,
unlike the stars, the waves do not differ in glory, and the spread
of their splendor, when they seem to roll over a conquered universe,
appeals to the imagination with the solemn suggestion not that order
rules but that old chaos settles in solemn peace. The days terminate
on this abyss in marvelous glories. The glowing spectacle is not
in the west alone, but the gorgeous conflagration of the palaces we
build in dreams spreads all around the sky. The scene one evening in
the vicinity of the sun departing in Asia to light up the morning
of the everlasting to-morrow touching America with magical riches,
was that of Niagara Falls ten thousand times magnified and turned
to molten gold, that burned with inconceivable luster, while the
south and north and east were illuminated with strange fires and
soft lights, fading and merged at last in the daffodil sky. Then
the west became as a forest of amazing growth, and the ship entered
its dusky recesses like a hunter for game such as the world never
saw--and we looked upon the slow-fading purple islands that are the
northern fringes of the greater one of the Philippines, and studied
the rather faint and obscure