The country around Manila, though no more than an extended plain for some miles, is one of great interest and beauty, and affords many agreeable rides on the roads to Santa Anna and Maraquino. Most of the country-seats are situated on the river Pasig; they may indeed be called palaces, from their extent and appearance. They are built upon a grand scale, and after the Italian style, with terraces, supported by strong abutments, decked with vases of plants. The grounds are ornamented with the luxuriant, lofty, and graceful trees of the tropics; these are tolerably well kept. Here and there fine large stone churches, with their towers and steeples, are to be seen, the whole giving the impression of a wealthy nobility and a happy and flourishing peasantry. THE ASCENT OF MOUNT TYNDALL. CLARENCE KING. [In 1864 Professor Josiah Dwight Whitney, State Geologist of California, sent a band of five explorers for a summer's campaign in the high Sierras. Clarence King was assistant geologist of the party; he recounted their researches and adventures in "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada," published in 1871 by J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston; three years later the same firm issued an enlarged edition with maps. "The Ascent of Mount Tyndall," the third chapter of the book, is one of the most thrilling stories of adventure ever written. Clarence King suggested and organized the United States Geological Survey, and was its director 1878-81. He died in 1901.] Morning dawned brightly upon our bivouac among a cluster of dark firs in the mountain corridor, opened by an ancient glacier of King's River in the heart of the Sierras. It dawned a trifle sooner than we could have wished, but Professor Brewer and Hoffman had breakfasted before sunrise, and were off with barometer and theodolite upon their shoulders, proposing to ascend our amphitheatre to its head and climb a great pyramidal peak which swelled up against the eastern sky, closing the view in that direction. We, who remained in camp, spent the day in overhauling campaign materials and preparing for a grand assault upon the summits. For a couple of hours we could descry our friends through the field-glasses, their minute black forms moving slowly on among piles of giant debris; now and then lost, again coming into view, and at last disappearing altogether. It was twilight of evening and almost eight o'clock when they came back to camp, Brewer leading the way, Hoffman following; and as they sat down by our fire without uttering a word we read upon their faces terrible fatigue. So we hastened to give them supper of coffee and soup, bread and venison, which resulted, after a time, in our getting in return the story of the day. For eight whole hours they had worked up over granite and snow, mounting ridge after ridge, till the summit was made about two o'clock.