Next, a second stop at Cebu for the mails bound Manilaward, a good-by for the second time to our friends, and the Uranus now kept back down the coast toward Dumaguete, a prosperous town on the rich sugar-island of Negros. At ten o'clock that night we were off again, and Tuesday noon ushered us in to Iloilo, the second city of the Philippines. A lot of "go-downs" (store-houses) and dwellings on the swampy peninsula made a fearfully stupid-looking place, and the glare off the sheet-iron roofs was blinding. Scarcely a foot above tide-water, Iloilo was far less prepossessing than Manila, but everyone seemed cordial, and friends were so glad to see us that we appeared to confer a favor in stopping off to see them. The surroundings of Iloilo are far more picturesque than those of Manila, and just across the bay a wooded island, whose high altitude stands out in bold contrast to the marshes over which the city steeps, gave an outlook from the town that compensated for the inlook over dusty streets and dirty quays. The English club occupied its usually central position in the commercial section of the city, and formed an oasis of refreshment in the midst of the thirsty desert of iron roofs surrounding it. And if any single stanza of verse could have been quoted to describe the feelings of a newly arrived guest, sitting in a long chair on the club piazza and looking off at the bubbling volumes of hot air rising from those roofs, it would have been that in which the poet says: "Where the latitude's mean and the longitude's low, Where the hot winds of summer perennially blow, Where the mercury chokes the thermometer's throat, And the dust is as thick as the hair on a goat, Where one's throat is as dry as a mummy accursed, Here lieth the land of perpetual thirst." The afternoon-tea hour is perhaps more carefully observed among the English business houses here than in the capital to the north, and we left the very good little club, with its billiard-tables and stale newspapers, to join one of the regular gatherings in the large office of a friend. But tea, toast, jam, and oranges had no sooner been set before us than the deep whistle of the Uranus sounded, and those of us who were going north had to make a hurried adjournment to the neighboring wharf. Then, as everybody on deck began to say "adios," and everybody on shore "hasta la vista," the stubby little captain roared out "avante" and our steamer started for Manila, two hundred and fifty miles away.