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 medieval 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.