Misamis business detained the Uranus but for a short hour, and she then turned her head across the Bay eastward for Iligan, the seat of all the war operations in Mindanao. During the two hours and a half that our course led close along the hostile shore, we had breakfast and arrived at Iligan, the most dismal place in the world, about two o'clock in the afternoon. Everything looked down-in-the-mouth except the thermometer, and that was up in the roaring hundreds. The town was like all other Philippine villages, except that around the outskirts were the ruins of an old stockade with observation-towers, and in the streets soldiers, both native and Spanish, held the corners at every turn. While I paddled across a creek to get a photograph of some friendly savages on the other bank, one of my steamer friends went up to the Government house to make a formal visit. It seems he found no one at home except the wife of one of the high department officials, and she was reading the latest letters just fresh from the mail-bag of the Uranus. As I got back from across the river I heard a tremendous pandemonium going on in the upper story of the building in question, and soon my fellow-passenger came bolting down the stairs and out into the street below. The poor woman, on reading in her freshly opened letter that her husband, who had but recently gone up to Manila for a week's stay, was an absconder to the extent of some three hundred thousand dollars, suddenly lost her mind. He had tried to get across to China, so it seemed, but was taken on the sailing-day of the steamer, and the wife now first heard the news. So, as chairs and flower-pots came sailing out the windows or down the stairs, we wisely decided to get out of harm's way, and together walked back to the steamer-landing, musing on Spanish methods of pocket-lining. The Moros themselves are sturdy beggars, though most picturesque ones, and the tame specimens that came into Iligan were curious in the extreme. Dressed in native-made cloths of all colors, their heads were ornamented with turbans of red and white and blue, while gaudy sashes gave them an air of aristocratic distinction which few of their northern brothers possessed. Some of them black all their teeth, others only put war-paint on their two front pairs of ivories, and while some looked as if they had no chewing machinery at all, others appeared as if they might only have played centre rush on a modern foot-ball team.