night in Manila.

That great tree, as large as an Oak, which they call "The Flame of the Forest," looks like a tree on fire with flowers. One will roam the world over and see nothing more beautiful than this great tree which looks like a massive umbrella of solid flame.

Every flower in the Orient seems to be a crimson flower. The tropical heat of the Philippines, Java, Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay States and India's far reaches; with beautiful Ceylon, and Burma; seems to give birth to crimson child-flowers.

The sunsets burst into bloom, as well as the flowers. There is no region on earth where sunsets flare into birth and die in a flash-light of glory and beauty like they do in the regions of the South China Sea. For months at a stretch, every night, without a break, the most wildly gorgeous, flaming, flaring, flashing crimson sunsets crown the glory of the days.

I have been interested in catching pictures of sunsets all over the world. I have caught hundreds of sunsets with the Graflex; and other hundreds have I captured with a Corona, just as they occurred; and I have never seen a spot on earth where the sunsets were such glorious outbursts of crimson and golden beauty as across the circling shores of Manila Bay.

Night after night I have sat in that ancient city and watched these tumultuous, tumbling, Turner-like flashes of color.

One night the sky was flame from sea to zenith across Manila Bay. It was like a great Flame of the Forest tree in full bloom. Against this sky of flaming sunset-clouds, hundreds of ships, anchored in the bay, lit their lesser crimson lights; while, now and then, a battleship which was signaling to another ship, flashed its message of light against the fading glow of glory in the crimson sunset.

"It is light talking unto light; flash unto flash; crimson unto crimson!" said a friend who sat with me looking out across that beautiful bay.

The picture of that flaming sunset, with the great vessels silhouetted against it; with the little lights on the ships, running in parallel rows; and the flashing lights of signals from the masts of the battleship will never die in one's memory.

It was a quiet, peaceful scene.

But suddenly, like a mighty volcano a burst of flame swept into the air at the mouth of the Pasig River. It leapt into the sky and lighted up the entire harbor in a great conflagration. The little ships stood out, silhouetted against that great flaming oil tanker.

"It's a ship on fire!" Otto exclaimed.

"Let's go and see it!" I added.

Then we were off for the mouth of the Pasig which was not far away.

There we saw the most spectacular fire I have ever seen. A great oil tanker full of Cocoanut-oil had burst into flame, trapping thirty men in its awful furnace. Its gaunt masts stood out like toppling tree skeletons from a forest fire against the now deepening might; made vivid and livid by the bursting flames that leapt higher and higher with each successive explosion from a tank of gasoline or oil.

I got out my Graflex and caught several pictures of this flash-light of flame, but none that will be as vivid, as lurid, or as lasting as the flash-light that was etched into the film of my memory.

The next flash-light of flame came bursting out of midnight darkness on the island of Java.

We were bound for old Bromo, that giant volcano of Java. We had started at midnight and it would take us until daylight to reach the crater-brink of this majestic mountain of fire.

White flashes of light, leapt from Bromo at frequent intervals all night long as we traveled on ponies through the tropical jungle trail, upward, and onward to the brink of that pit of hell.

White flashes of light leapt from Bromo at the narrow rail. They called them "Night-Blooming Lilies," and sure enough they blanketed the rugged pathway that night like so many tiny white Fairies. Indeed there was something beautifully weird in their white wonder against the night. They looked like frail, earth-angels playing in the star-light, sending out a sweet odor which mingled strangely with the odor of sulphur from the volcano.

And back of all this was the background of that awful, thundering, rumbling and grumbling volcano as somber as suicide. Strangely weird flashes lighted the mountains for miles around.

"It looks like heat lightning back at home," said an American.

"Only the flashes are more vivid!" said another member of the party.

Those flashes of light from the inner fires of the earth, bursting from the fissures of restless volcano Bromo shall ever remain, like some strange glimpse of a new Inferno.

Volcanic Merapi, another belching furnace of Java, gave me a picture of a flash-light of flame.

The night that we stayed up on the old temple of Boroboedoer, Merapi was unusually active; and now and then its flashes of flame lighted up the whole beautiful valley between the temple and the mountain.

At each flash of fire, the tall Bamboo and Cocoanut trees loomed like graceful Javanese women in the midst of far-reaching, green, rice paddies; while two rivers that met below us, wound under that light like two silver threads in the night.

Once, when an unusually heavy flash came from Merapi, we saw below us a beautiful Javanese girl clasped in the arms of her brown lover. Each seemed to be stark naked as they stood under a Cocoanut tree like Rodin bronzes.

It was this beautiful girl's voice that we later heard singing to her lover a Javanese love song in the tropical night.

This, I take it, was the Flame of Love; a flame which lights up the world forever; everywhere her devotees, clothed or naked, are the same; forever and a day; be it on the streets of Broadway; along the lanes of the Berkshire Hills of New England; up the rugged trails of the Sierras; or along the quiet, tree-lined streets of an American village. It is a flame; this business of love; a flame which, flashing by day and night, lights the world to a new glory.

* * * * * *

One night the missionaries in Korea saw flames bursting out against the hills.

"What is it?" they cried, filled with fear.

"The Japanese are burning the Korean villages!" said one who knew.

All night long the villages burned and all night long the people were murdered. Runners brought news to the hillsides of Seoul where anxious, broken-hearted American missionaries waited.

"One, two, three, four, five; ten, fifteen, twenty; thirty, forty, fifty; a hundred, two hundred, three hundred; villages are burning," so came the messages.

The entire peninsula was lighted as with a great holocaust.

It is said that the light could be seen from Fusan itself, a hundred miles away.

"From our village it looked like a light over a great American steel-mill city," said a missionary to me.

And when the morning came, the flames were still leaping high against the crimson sky of dawn.

For days this burning of villages continued. Belgium never saw more ruthless flame and fire; set by sterner souls; or harder hearts!

That was two years ago.

The villages are charred ruins now. Some of them have never been rebuilt. The murdered people of these villages have gone back to dust.

The Japanese think that the fires are out. They thought, when the flames of those burning villages ceased leaping into the skies; and at last were but smouldering embers; that the flames had died. But the Japanese were wrong, for on that very day, the Flames of Freedom began to burn in Korean hearts and souls! And from that day to this; those flames have been rising higher and higher. These are Flash-Lights of Flame that, as