The time of our landing was in the midst of the rainy season, and our clothing each morning when we arose to dress was as wet as if it had just come from a wringer. Our underclothing could be drawn on only with difficulty and the excessive disagreeableness of the feeling added no little to the discomfort of the situation.
When the Spaniard, attracted by riches of these distant islands that he had named for his King Philip, built the city of Manila, he modeled it after the mediaeval towns of his European home. And it is well that he did so, for, if we give credence to the city's history, its early life was not one of undisturbed quiet. Not to mention the sea-rovers of those early times who paid their piratical respects to the town, legend has it that this old wall has saved the city on two separate occasions from bands of Moros sweeping northward from the southern islands. So Manila consists of two parts, the city "intra muros" and the new city which has sprung up around it.
It was on the morning following our landing that I first stood upon the old stone bridge that for one hundred and fifty years has borne the traffic between the old city and the new. The strokes of eight o'clock were pealing forth from the tower of a neighboring _ecclesia_ when I purposely took this station that I might see the current of Manila's life when flowing at its height.
At short intervals along the entire length of the bridge stood in its center a line of well-shaped American policemen in neat _Khaki_ uniforms and russet leather leggins. Thousands of pedestrians were pouring across the bridge in a ceaseless stream. Between the two lines of pedestrians moved in opposite directions two lines of vehicles and carts. It was indeed a cosmopolitan mixture of people. There were English bankers, French jewelers, German chemists, Spanish merchants, foreign consuls, officers and privates of the American army, seamen from foreign warships lying in the bay, Chinese of all classes and conditions from silk-clad bankers to almost naked coolies trotting along with burdens swung over their shoulders. There were Japanese, and East India merchants from Bombay and Calcutta, and, finally, all classes and conditions of Filipinos apparently representing all of the seventeen separate branches of the race,--each individual in this wonderful stream following the channel of his own necessities.