Sunday I left my room at the club and moved into our new house out in the suburb of Santa Mesa. It is just a week now since the Chinese cook came and began to christen the pots and saucepans, whose Spanish names I shall never get to remember. He began by rendering me a small account of the "extras" provided for our table, and I was floored the first thing on an item of five cents put down as "Hongos." I asked him what that was. He spluttered around in Spanish and looked about the room to see if he couldn't find a few growing in one of our pictures of still life on the walls. At length, being struck with an inspiration, he seized a small fan, excitedly stuck it into one of our flower-pots, balanced on top of it an inverted ash-tray, and danced around, pointing first to the item on the bill and then to the peculiar growth in the flower-pot. I confess I didn't follow his reasoning, till suddenly it struck me that for our first dinner in the new house we had partaken of mushrooms. Not far off from an ash-tray balanced on a Japanese fan growing out of a flower-pot--are they? The style of decoration in our house is especially Japanese, and, needless to say, artistic, since there are large Japanese and Indian shops in Manila, where one can get all sorts of gimcracks at low prices. Our servants number seven, a small quota for two of us. Although their wages are small, amounting, as a rule, to $4 apiece per month, yet it is necessary to have plenty of them, in order that a certain few shall be awake when wanted. The fresh breeze, which in the evenings and early mornings blows down direct from the lofty mountains, is so cool that often several blankets have been necessary in the sleeping contrivance. Mosquitoes are still conspicuous by their absence, but the rats up in the roof sound tremendously numerous. All night they seem to be pulling boxes to and fro, taking up boards and nailing them down, and having a general all-hands-round sort of a dance.