My husband sailed from Naples on the 24th of July, and I, with the three children and their French governess, started north by Venice and Vienna to spend a few weeks in the mountains of Switzerland before returning to Manila.
There were rather terrifying reports of a cholera epidemic raging in the Philippines and I dreaded the prospects of going into it with my children, but I knew that heroic efforts were being made to check it and I felt confident that, in Manila at least, it would have run its course before I should arrive, so I booked passage on the German steamer Hamburg and on the 3rd of September sailed for the East and the tropics once more.
Last Days in the Philippines
When Mr. Taft reached Manila he found the city en fĂŞte and in a state of intense excitement which had prevailed for two days during which the people had expected every hour to hear the great siren on the cold storage plant announce that the little Alava , the government coastguard boat which had been sent to Singapore to get him, had been sighted off Corregidor.
When the announcement finally came, everything in the harbour that could manage to do so steamed down the Bay to meet him, and when the launch to which he had transferred from the Alava came up to the mouth of the Pásig River and under the walls of old Fort Santiago, seventeen guns boomed out a Governor’s salute, while whistles and bells and sirens all over the bay and river and city filled the air with a deafening din.