I sallied out later in the afternoon, dressed in not much more than a squash-hat, a rubber coat, and a pair of boots, whose soles were holy enough to let the water out as fast as it came in. It was as much as one could do to stand against the blast, but I managed to keep along behind the houses, cross the streets, and reach the Luneta, where all the lamps bent their heads with broken glass, and where the huge waves were flying far up into the air in their efforts to dispose of the stone sea-wall. The clumps of fishing and bath houses which stood perched on posts out in the surf were being fast battered to pieces, and those which were not minus roof and sides were washed up into the road as driftwood. The natives were rushing gingerly hither and thither, grabbing such logs as they could find, while some of the fishermen's families were crouching behind a stone wall watching their wrecked barns, and sitting on their saucepans, furniture, and babies, to keep them from sailing skyward. The surf was tremendous, the vessels in the bay were shrouded in spray, and several of them seemed almost to be ashore in the breakers. A steamer appeared to have broken adrift and was locked in the embrace of a Nova Scotia bark. But everything comes to an end and as night drew on the winds and rain subsided and comparative quiet succeeded a season of exaggerated movement and din. The typhoon was wide in diameter, perhaps two hundred miles, and so was not destructive, like the one that laid Manila low way back in the '80's. It seems that the larger the diameter of one of these circular storms, the less its intensity, and although the wind at any given time is moving with tremendous velocity within the circle, the whole disturbance is not advancing at a pace much over a dozen miles an hour. After the typhoon came the floods, and the old Pasig covered the adjacent country. The water concealed the road to the uptown club at Nagtajan under a depth of several feet, and one could without difficulty row into the billiard-room or play water-polo in the bowling-alley. Two of my friends were nearly drowned by trying to drive when they should have swum or gone by boat. The pony walked off with their carriage into a rice-field, in the darkness, and was drowned in more than eight feet of water. The boys only crawled out with difficulty, and just managed to reach "dry land" (that with three feet of water over it) in the nick of time. As it was, one of them practically saved the other's life, and has since been presented with a gold watch, which does not run.