After beginning the morning by ordering a dozen suits of white sheeting from a native tailor--price $2.50 apiece--I was introduced to the members of the English Club, and began to feel more at home stretched out in one of the long chairs in the cool library. It seems that the club affords shelter and refreshment to its fourscore members at two widely separated points of the compass, one just on the banks of the Pasig River, where its waters, slouching down from the big lake at the foot of the mountains, are first introduced to the outlying suburbs of the city, and the other in the heart of the business section. The same set of native servants do for both departments, since no one stays uptown during the middle of the day and no one downtown after business hours. As a result, on week-days, after the light breakfast of the early morning is over at the uptown building, the staff of waiters and assistants hurry downtown in the tram-cars and make ready for the noon meal at the other structure, returning home to the suburbs in time to officiate at dinner. At the downtown club is the 6,000-volume library, and after the noonday tiffin it is always customary to stretch out in one of the long bamboo chairs and read one's self to sleep. This is indeed a land where laziness becomes second nature. If you want a book or paper on the table, and they lie more than a yard or two from where you are located, it is not policy to reach for them. O, no! You ring a bell twice as far off, take a nap while the boy comes from a distance, and wake up to find him handing you them with a graceful "Aquí, Señor!" In fact, I have even just now met an English fellow who, they tell me, took a barber with him on a recent trip to the southern provinces, to look after his scanty beard that was composed of no more than three or four dozen hairs, each of which grew one-eighth of an inch quarterly. On the day before Christmas one of the guest-rooms at the uptown club was vacated, and I moved in. The building is about two and a half miles out of the city, and its broad balcony, shaded by luxuriant palms and other tropical trees, almost overhangs the main river that splits Manila in two. The view from this tropical piazza is most peaceful. Opposite lie the rice-fields, with a cluster of native huts surrounding an old church, while, blue in the distance, sleeps a range of low mountains. To the left the river winds back up-country and soon loses itself in many turns among the foothills that later grow into the more adult uplifts on the Pacific Coast, while to the right it turns a sharp corner and slides down between broken rows of native huts and more elaborate bungalows.