Here we are, eight days out from Manila, steaming up through that far-famed inland sea of Japan, on the good ship Coptic, bound for San Francisco; and for the life of me those twenty-four moons just passed all seem to huddle into yesterday. Surely it was only the day before that the China was taking me and my trunks the other way. And so it takes but eight short days of new experiences, new food, new air, to efface completely the effect of seven hundred yesterdays in the Philippines. Those whole seven hundred seem now as but one, and when I think of all the housekeeping, the bookkeeping, the hemp-pressing, and the cheerful putting up with all sorts of things, they all seem to be playing leapfrog with each other in the dream of a night, and I wake up to find the pines of Japan lending a certain cordial to the air that is very grateful. We never knew what we were missing in Manila in the slight matter of eating alone until we got over to Hong Kong again, and it is perhaps just as well we didn't. To think of the "dead hen," as they call it, and rice, the daily couple of eggs, the fried potatoes, and the banana-fritters on which we have tried to fatten our frames, and then look at the bill of fare on the Coptic! We exiles from Manila have gained over five pounds in these eight days, and would almost go through another two years in the haunts of heathendom for the sake of again living through a sundry few days like the past eight, in which the inner man wakes up to see his opportunities, and makes up for lost time on soups that are not all rice and water, on fish that is not fishy, on chickens that are not boiled almost alive, on roasts that taste not of garlic, on vegetables that are something more than potatoes, on butter that is not axle-grease, and on puddings and pies that are not made of chopped blotting paper and flavored with pomatum sauces. An exuberance of spirit must be forgiven, for so welcome is the change from the old cultivated Manila contentment that the present burst of native enthusiasm is but natural. Not that I am playing false to the Malay capital--for let it be said that when once you have forgotten the good things at home the articles which that Pearl of the Orient had to furnish went well enough indeed--but that after schooling one's taste to things of low degree it is peculiarly melodramatic to return to things of high estate. Our send-off from Manila on the 14th was as gay as the sad occasion could warrant, and several launch-loads of the "bosses and the boys" worried out to bid us a last adios. The Esmeralda was to have the honor of taking us away from the place to which she had brought us, and I was thoroughly prepared to go through the interesting process that was needed finally to straighten me out after the peculiar twisting which the voyage from Manila to Hong Kong had given me two years before.