With what precision the stranger ships came on, circling, and pouring death into the helpless vessels whose wooden hulks graft had left exposed to shell! How aimlessly and helplessly the Spanish vessels floundered, unable to fight, and finding no escape! It was war, glorious and terrible. In Spain a thousand widows and orphans would weep and miss forever that which had been taken from them in a quarrel in which the fighters had no interest. In America a million would scream for joy and tingle with the glory of slaughter and the thought of being splendid fighters. Within half an hour nearly four hundred able-bodied men perished and twenty million dollars' worth of property that should have been used to make life happier and better was destroyed. It was a great drama, in a splendid amphitheatre, with the lifting curtains of night to show it forth, enacted for the few in the towers. Ambrosia had seen and understood and was silenced by the grandeur and horror of it. She felt for the dying, and could hardly restrain herself from crying out in agony when the American fleet ceased firing and calmly moved away to prepare, within sight of the wrecks and the sacrifice, breakfast for the living, after their hour's toil. "Oh, God, but this is horrible," she muttered, faint with her feelings. As she spoke, once again she was startled with a voice at her side. She turned to behold an old man with a long beard, but she knew the voice, the voice of Saguanaldo, and it said: "Ambrosia, chuleta, it is the dawn, not only of a new day, but also of a new era." II. LIBERTY'S CENTURY-OLD LOVER. "A beautiful city, Admiral Rainey--from a distance. Strongly fortified--for the fifteenth century. But you can sweep away the fortifications as easily as you sank the Spanish war vessels. What is a walled city with a moat to guns that will carry for miles?" "I do not doubt, General Saguanaldo," returned the American admiral as he sat on deck of his flag ship in the harbor of Manila, faultlessly garbed as though for a party, talking to the Filipino insurgent after the battle that had spread his name around the globe, "I do not doubt my ability to reduce the Spanish works, but I was looking to the future. Should I destroy so much private property as would be involved in bombarding Manila I would make enemies of the owners, who would give us trouble in days to come. I dare not take such a serious step until I am instructed from America." "But consider, admiral," plead the insurgent, "Manila sits there, fair to see, but she has drawn the very life from the people of the interior for centuries. The private property of which you speak was gotten from labor by the sorrow of others." "You are doubtless right, general, and I would not blame you if you should seek revenge from them, for your people have suffered greatly. But with me it is a different proposition. I am not acting for myself alone."