Now that I have inoculated my page with a reference to this rather unpleasant subject, it is only a bit of sad truth to tell of the only fatality caused by the malady in our little Anglo-Saxon colony. Recently I went into the Bay with a young Englishman who had always lived in terror of this one disease, and had avoided both contact with the natives and excursions into the infected districts. The launch took me to the vessel which we were loading, and then carried him on to that receiving cargo from his concern. Later she returned with him, picked me up, and together we went ashore to stop a moment at the club before going home for the day. I never saw him again, poor chap, though I did take over his stable, for next morning he was taken with black small-pox and died in a week. The families of the lightermen in the Bay--crowded as they are into the hen-coops over the stern of the bulky craft--are full of it, and hence the fatal ending to our little afternoon excursion. As a rule, however, the members of the English-speaking colony get so used to this disease that they have no especial fear in suddenly turning a sharp corner of running into some native sufferer. In days gone by, when cholera decimated Manila's numbers, when people died faster than they could be buried, when business was at a standstill and the city one great death-house, were the times that tried men's souls. But now that those big water-mains which run along the ground bring fresh water from far up into the hills, the natives have given up the deadly practice of drinking from the river, and, thanks to the good supply system, no longer give the cholera free admittance. Besides small-pox, then, fever is about the greatest enemy, and certain types of the malarial variety seem so common that the sufferers from them often walk into the club, drop into a chair, and say, "Got the fever again. Means another lay-off." If they can keep about, the old stagers never give up; but novices buy thermometers and cracked ice, and either go through a terrific siege, like my friend, whose eight weeks' struggle shrunk his head so that in convalescence his hat touched his ears, or escape with a week's initiation. Typhoid seems also common, and there is generally one member of the colony, for whom the rest are anxious, stretched out in ice-baths and wishing he had never seen the Philippines. The old hands--who, by the way, seem to be regular sufferers from the fever--all say the only way to be safe is to drink plenty of whiskey, but so far I have found that the less one takes the better off he is.