RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
and the children, the most important thing in sight was a little fleet of harbour launches which came hurrying down the Bay to meet us. I saw my husband and General Wright standing in the bow of one of these long before they could pick us out in the crowd of passengers lining the rails of the Kasuga Maru.
Then came the happy welcomings which make absences worth while; excited children; everybody talking at once; explanations begun and never finished; interruptions by customs officials—American soldiers in those days; comments on the heat and the bright white light, and laughing assurances that it wasn't hot at all and that the climate was perfect; transferring baggage to the launch; glimpsing, occasionally, strange scenes and strange peoples; asking and answering a thousand questions; busy, bustling, delightfully confusing hours of landing in the farthest orient.
Our husbands turned themselves into willing "Baedekers" and instructed us on the way. We steamed up in our little launch to the mouth of the Pásig River, wide and deep and swift, and covered with what looked to me like millions of small, green cabbages.
"Carabao lettuce; the river's full of it," explained Mr. Taft, but I was much too occupied just then to stop and ask what "carabao lettuce" might be.
We came up past a bristling fort at the corner of a great, grey, many-bastioned and mediæval wall which stretched as far as I could see down the bay shore on one side and up the river on the other.
"The Old Walled City," said General Wright, and I knew at once that I should love the old Walled City.
"The oldest parts of the walls were built in the seventeenth century," continued our animated guide-book, "and the fort on the corner is Santiago. The big dome is the Cathedral and all the red tile roofs are convents and monasteries. The twentieth century hasn't reached here yet.
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