Now that it has come down to actually leaving Manila, I begin to feel the home sickness that comes from tearing one's self away from the midst of friends and a congenial life. I shall miss the hearty Englishmen with whom I rowed or played tennis or went into the country. I shall miss the servants who got so little for making life the easier. I shall miss the ponies, the dogs with the black tongues, and the cats with the crooks in their tails; the big fire-engine which we used to run, and which has now been varnished over to save trouble in cleaning; the Luneta, with its soft breezes and good music; the walks out on to the long breakwater to see the sunset, and the hobnobbing with the old salts from the ships in the bay, who called our office the little American oasis in the midst of a great desert of foreign houses. But the clock has struck, and the Esmeralda ought early next month to start us on the forty-day voyage back to God's country. October 22d. Is this sleep, or not sleep? Is it reality or fancy? Am I laboring under a hallucination, a weird phantasmagoria, or are my powers of appreciation, my efferent nerve-centres and their connecting links, my sum total of receptive faculties, doing their duty? I feel hypnotized. I kick myself to see if this is real, and am only led to conclude it is by looking into my sewing-kit, where the needles are rusty, the thread gone, and the depleted stock of suspender-buttons wrongly shoved into the partition labelled "piping-cord." I never did know what piping-cord was. My socks are holy, my handkerchiefs have burst in tears, and my lingerie in general looks as if it had been used for a Chinese ensign on one of the ships that fought in the naval battle of the Yalu. For two years those garments have held together under the peculiar processes of Philippine laundering, but now that barbarians have once more got hold of them and subjected them to modern treatment, they recognize the enemy and go to pieces. And so the condition of my clothes leads me to believe I am awake, although everything else suggests the dream. Actually away from Manila, actually eating food that is food once more, actually sleeping on springs and mattresses, putting on heavier clothes, talking the English language, meeting civilized people, and realizing what it means to be homeward bound! It seems unreal after those two years of Manila life that was so different, so divorced from the busy life of the western world; much more unreal than did the new Philippine environment appear two years ago, after jumping into it fresh from God's country, as the Captain called it.