A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines

By
Mary H. Fee

Illustrated from Photographs
Second Edition
Chicago A.C. McClurg & Co. 1912

Copyright

A.C. McClurg & Co. 1910

Published March 26, 1910
Second Edition, March 2, 1912

The University Press, Cambridge, USA.

To
My Schoolmate and Life-Long Friend
Martha Parry Gish
This Book
Is Affectionately Dedicated

Contents

I.[The Voyage Begins]11
II.[From San Francisco toHonolulu]21
III.[Our Ten Days’Sightseeing]26
IV.[From Honolulu to Manila]38
V.[Our First Few Days in theCity]45
VI.[From Manila To Capiz]60
VII.[My First Experiences As a Teacher ofFilipinos]73
VII.[An Analysis of FilipinoCharacter]86
IX.[My Early Experiences inHousekeeping]107
X.[Filipino Youths andMaidens]119
XI.[Social and Industrial Condition of theFilipinos]130
XII.[Progress in Politics and Improvement ofthe Currency]150
XIII.[Typhoons and Earthquakes]168
XIV.[War Alarms and the SufferingPoor]179
XV.[The Filipino’s ChristmasFestivities and His Religion] 192
XVI.[My Gold-huntingExpedition]206
XVII.[An Unpleasant Vacation]217
XVIII.[The Aristocracy, the Poor, snd AmericanWomen]232
XIX.[Weddings in Town andCountry]250
XX.[Sickbeds and Funerals]262
XXI.[Sports and Amusements]270
XXII.[Children’s Games—The Conquestof Fires]280

Illustrations

A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines

The Voyage Begins

I Find the Transport Ship Buford and My Stateroom—Old Maids and Young Maids Bound for the Orient—The Deceitful Sea—Making New Friends and Acquaintances.

On a hot July day the army transport Buford lay at the Folsom Dock, San Francisco, the Stars and Stripes drooping from her stern, her Blue Peter and a cloud of smoke announcing a speedy departure, and a larger United States flag at her fore-mast signifying that she was bound for an American port. I observed these details as I hurried down the dock accompanied by a small negro and a dressing-bag, but I was not at that time sufficiently educated to read them. I thought only that the Buford seemed very large (she is not large, however), that she was beautifully white and clean; and that I was delighted to be going away to foreign lands upon so fine a ship.

Having recognized with relief a pile of luggage going aboard—luggage which I had carefully pasted with red, white, and blue labels crossed by the letters “U.S.A.T.S.” and Buford—I dismissed the negro, grasped the dressing-bag with fervor, and mounted the gangway. To me the occasion was momentous. I was going to see the world, and I was one of an army of enthusiasts enlisted to instruct our little brown brother, and to pass the torch of Occidental knowledge several degrees east of the international date-line.

I asked the first person I met, who happened to be the third officer, where I should go and what I should do. He told me to report at the quartermaster’s office at the end of the promenade deck. A white-haired, taciturn gentleman in the uniform of a major, U.S.A., was occupying this apartment, together with a roly-poly clerk in a blue uniform which seemed to be something between naval and military. When I mentioned my name and showed my order for transportation, the senior officer grunted inarticulately, and waved me in the direction of his clerk, glaring at me meanwhile with an expression which combined singularly the dissimilar effects of a gimlet and a plane. The rotund junior contented himself with glancing suspiciously at the order and sternly at me. As if reassured, however, by my plausible countenance, he flipped over the pages of a ledger, told me the number of my stateroom, and hunted up a packet of letters, which he delivered with an acid reproof to me for not having reported before, saying that the letters had been accumulating for ten days.

It is true that the Buford had been scheduled to sail on the first day of the month; but I had arrived a day or two before that date, only to learn that the sailing date had been postponed to the tenth. I had made many weary trips to the army headquarters in Montgomery Street, asking for mail—and labels—with no results. Nobody had suggested that the mail would be delivered aboard ship, and I had not had sense enough to guess it. I did not make any explanations to the quartermaster and his clerk, however, because an intuition warned me not to add tangible evidence to a general belief in civilian stupidity. I merely swallowed my snubbing meekly and walked off.

I ambled about, clinging to the dressing-bag and looking for some one resembling a steward. At the foot of the ladder leading to the bridge I encountered two young girls descending therefrom with evidences of embarrassed mirth. They were Radcliffe girls, whose evil genius had led them to the bridge and to an indignant request to explain their presence there. They explained to no purpose, and, in response to a plaintive inquiry where to go, were severely told, “We don’t know, but go down from here immediately.” So they came down, crimson but giggling, and saw me (they said) roaming about with an expression at once wistful and complacent.

I found a steward and my stateroom at last, and a brown-haired, brown-eyed young woman in it who was also a pedagogue. We introduced ourselves, disposed of our parcels, and began to discuss the possibilities of the voyage. She was optimistically certain that she was not going to be seasick. I was pessimistically certain that I was. And she was wrong, and I was right. We were both gloriously, enthusiastically, madly seasick.

When we returned to the deck, it was crowded with passengers, the mail was coming aboard, and all sorts of bugle-calls were sounding, for we were carrying “casuals.” It was a matter of wonder that so many persons should have gathered to bid adieu to a passenger list recruited from all parts of the Union. The dock was black with people, and our deck was densely crowded. Khaki-clad soldiers leaned over the side to shout to more khaki on the dock. An aged, poorly dressed woman was crying bitterly, with her arms about the neck of a handsome boy, one of our cabin passengers; and all about, the signs of intense feeling showed that the voyage marked no light interval of separation.

I stood at the forward rail of the promenade deck, and fell into conversation with a gentleman whom I had met in San Francisco and who was a fellow passenger. We agreed in being glad that none of our relatives were there to see us off; but, though we made much ado to seem matter-of-fact and quite strong-minded about expatriating ourselves, I noticed that he cleared his throat a great deal, and my chin annoyed me by a desire to tremble.

The gongs warned visitors ashore, and, just as all the whistles of San Francisco were blowing the noon hour, we backed away from the dock, and turned our head to sea. As the little line of green water between ship and dock widened to a streamlet and then to a river, the first qualm concerning the wisdom of the expedition struck its chilly way to my heart. Probably most of the passengers were experiencing the same doubts; and the captain suspected the fact, for he gave us fire drill just to distract our attention and to settle our nerves.

The luncheon gong sounded immediately after his efficacious diversion, and the military people who were to eat in the first section—the Buford’s dining-room was small—went down to lunch. The junior lieutenants, and the civil engineers and schoolteachers, who made up her civilian list, took their last look at San Francisco. We swung past Alcatraz Island and heard the army bugles blowing there. The irregular outline of the city with its sky-scrapers printed itself against a background of dazzling blue, with here and there a tufty cloud. The day was symbolic of the spirit which sent young America across the Pacific—hope, brilliant hope, with just a cloud of doubt.

We passed the Golden Gate just as our own luncheon gong sounded, and the Buford was rolling to the heave of the outside sea as we sat down to our meal. At our own particular table we were eight—eight nice old (and young) maid schoolteachers. Some of us were plump and some were wofully thin. One was built on heroic lines of bone, and those sinners from Radcliffe were pretty.

Toward the end of luncheon the Buford began to roll and pitch and otherwise behave herself “most unbecoming,” and my room-mate, declining to finish her luncheon, fled to the deck, where the air was fresher. Feeling no qualms myself, and secretly triumphing in her disillusion, I followed with her golf cape and rug, of which she had been too engrossed to think. My San Francisco acquaintance coming to my assistance, we established her in a steamer chair and sat down, one on each side, to cheer her up,—and badly she needed it, for her courage was fast deserting her.

The sea was running heavily, and the wind was cold; I had not thought there could be such cold in July. The distance was obscured by a silvery haze which was not thick enough to be called a fog, but which lent a wintry aspect to sea and sky—a likeness increased by the miniature snow-field on each side of the bow as the water flung up and melted away in pools like bluish-white snow ice.

As the Buford waded into the swell, wave after wave dashed over the forward deck, drenching a few miserable soldiers there, who preferred to soak and freeze rather than to go inside and be seasick. Sometimes the spray leaped hissing up on the promenade deck, and our weather side was dripping, as I found when I went over there. I also slipped and fell down, but as that side of the ship was deserted, nobody saw me—to my gratification. I petted a bruised shin a few minutes and went back to the lee side a wiser woman.

About three o’clock, when Miss R——’s face was assuming a fine, corpse-like green tint, I began to have a hesitating and unhappy sensation in the pit of the stomach, a suggestion of doubt as to the wisdom of leaving the solid, reliable land, and trusting myself to the fickle and deceitful sea. In a few moments these disquieting hints had grown to a positive clamor, and my head and heels were feeling very much as do those of gentlemen who have been dining out with “terrapin and seraphim” and their liquid accompaniments. At this time Miss R—— gave out utterly and went below, but I was filled with the idea that seasickness can be overcome by an effort of will, and stayed on, making an effort to “demonstrate,” as the Christian Scientists say, and trying to look as if nothing were the matter. The San Francisco man remained by me, persistent in an apparently disinterested attempt to entertain me; but I was not deluded, for I recognized in his devotion the fiendish joy of the un-seasick watching the unconfessed tortures of those who are.

It was five o’clock when I gasped with a last effort of facetious misery, “And yet they say people come to sea for their health,” and went below. The Farralones Islands, great pinky-gray needles of bleak rock, were sticking up somewhere in the silvery haze on our starboard side, and I loathed the Farralones Islands, and the clean white ship, and myself most of all for embarking upon an idiotic voyage.

Arrived in the stateroom, it was with little less than horror that I saw Miss R—— in the lower berth—my berth. Such are the brutalizing influences of seasickness that I immediately reminded her that hers was above. She dragged herself out, and, in a very ecstasy of selfish misery, I discarded my garments and burrowed into the warmth of my bed. Never had blankets seemed more comfortable, for, between the wind and the seasickness, I was chilled through and through.

I fell asleep through sheer exhaustion, and wakened some time after in darkness. The waves were hissing and slapping at the porthole; the second steward was cursing expertly in the linen closet, which happened to be opposite our stateroom; and somewhere people in good health were consuming viands, for cooking odors and the rattle of dishes came to us. A door in the corridor opened, and the sound of a cornet was wafted back from the forward deck. Somebody was playing “The Holy City.” Steps went by. A voice with an English accent said, “By Jove, you can’t get away from that tune,” and, in one of those instants of stillness which fall in the midst of confusion, I heard a gurgling moan.

I snapped on the light and turned—at what cost only the seasick can appreciate—to behold Miss R—— sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. She was still shrouded in her golf cape and hood, and contemplated her boots—which were on her feet, sticking straight out before her—as if they were a source of mental as well as bodily inconvenience. At intervals she rolled her head and gave utterance to that shuddering moan.

Wretched as I was, I could not help gasping, “Are you enjoying your sea trip?” and she replied sepulchraily, “It isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.” We could say no more. That time we groaned in unison.

She must have gathered strength of mind and body in the night, however, for she was in her berth next morning when the stewardess came in to know what we wanted for breakfast. We did not want anything, as we quickly made reply. The wind went down that day; the next day was warm and clear, with a sea like sapphire, and we dragged ourselves to the deck. Recovery set in quickly enough then, so that we began to “think scornful” of seasickness. Fortunately the good ship Buford ploughed her way across the Pacific without meeting another swell, and our pride was not humbled again. We ate quite sparingly for a meal or two, and had fits of abstraction, gazing at the ceiling when extra-odorous dishes were placed in front of us. The Radcliffe girls said that they had passed a strenuous night, engaged in wild manœuvres to obtain possession of the monkey wrench and feloniously to secrete the same. Their collegiate training had included instruction on the hygienic virtues of fresh air, which made no allowance for a sea trip; and their views as to the practical application of these principles came sadly into conflict with the ideas of their bedroom steward. There were frantic searchings for a monkey wrench all that night, while the article lay snugly bestowed between the mattresses of a maiden who looked as if she might be thinking of the angels. Also their porthole was open in defiance of orders, and much water came into their stateroom. But they did not care, for it brought fresh air with it.

The first two or three days of the voyage were spent in taking stock of our fellow passengers and in finding our friends. We were about seventy-five cabin passengers in all,—a small family, it is true. The ship was coaled through to Manila, the first stop being Guam. So we made acquaintance here and there, settling ourselves for no paltry five or six days’ run, but for a whole month at sea. We all came on deck and took our fourteen laps—or less—around the promenade deck before breakfast. The first two or three nights, with a sort of congregational impulse, we drifted forward under the promenade awnings, and sang to the accompaniment of the cornetist on the troop deck. The soldiers sang too, and many an American negro melody, together with “On the Road to Mandalay” and other modern favorites, floated melodiously into the starlit silence of the Pacific. Our huge windsail flapped or bellied as the breeze fell or rose; the waves thumped familiarly against the sides; the masthead lantern burned clear as a star; and the real stars swung up and down as the bowsprit curtsied to each wave. In the intervals between songs a hush would fall upon us, and the sea noises were like effects in a theatre.

In a few days, however, our shyness and strangeness wore off. We no longer sang with the soldiers, but segregated ourselves into congenial groups; and under the electric lights the promenade deck looked, for all the world, like the piazza of a summer hotel.

From San Francisco to Honolulu

We Change Our Course and Arrive at Honolulu—The City Viewed from the Sea—Its Mixed Population—We Are Detained Ten Days For Engine Repairs.

When we were a week out from San Francisco and were eight hundred or a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands, the Buford stopped one evening just at sunset, and for at least twenty minutes slopped about in the gentle swell. There is a curious sense of dulness when the engines cease droning and throbbing; and the passengers, who had just come up from dinner, were affected by the unusual silence. We hung over the rail, talking in subdued tones and noting the beauty of the sunset.

Behind us the sea lay purple and dark, with the same sad, sweet loneliness that a prairie has in the dusk; but between us and the sun it resembled a molten mass, heaving with sinister power. Our bowsprit pointed straight at the fiery ball hanging on the sky rim, above which a pyramidal heaping of clouds aped the forms of temples set on rocky heights. And from that fantastic mingling of gold and pink and yellow the sky melted into azure streaked with pearl, and faded at the zenith into what was no color but night—the infinity of space unlighted.

When the engines started up, the gorgeous picture swung around until it stood on what is technically called the starboard beam, whereupon one of the engineers called my attention to the fact that we had changed our course. Since we were then headed due south, he added, we must be bound for Honolulu.

Everybody was pleased, though there was some little anxiety to know the cause of this disregard of orders and of our turning a thousand miles out of our course. In an ordinary merchant ship doubtless somebody would have been found with the temerity to ask the captain or some other officer what was the matter, but nobody was fool enough to do that on an army transport. The “ranking” officer aboard was rather intimate with the quartermaster captain, and we hoped something might be found out through him; but if the quartermaster made any confidences to the officer, that worthy kept them to himself. We women went to bed with visions of fire in the hold, or of “tail shafts” ready to break and race. The night passed tranquilly, however, and the next morning there was no perceptible anxiety about the officers. As the Buford’s record runs were about two hundred and sixty miles a day, the remembrance that something was wrong had almost faded before Honolulu was in sight.

We arrived at Honolulu during the night, and, the steward afterwards said, spent the second half of it “prancing” up and down outside the bar, waiting for the dawn. A suspicion that the staid Buford could prance anywhere would have brought me out of bed. I did rise once on my elbow in response to an excited whisper from the upper berth, in time to see a dazzle of electric lights swing into view through the porthole and vanish as the vessel dipped.

I dressed in time to catch the last of the sunrise, but when I went on deck, found that nearly half the passengers had been more enterprising than I. We were at anchor in the outer harbor, and Honolulu lay before us in all the enchantment of a first tropical vision. A mountain of pinky-brown volcanic soil—they call it Diamond Head—ran out into the sea on the right, and, between it and another hill which looks like an extinct crater and is called the Punch Bowl, a beach curved inward in a shining line of surf and sand. Back of this line lay some two or three miles of foreshore, covered with palm-trees and glossy tropical vegetation, from which peeped out the roofs and towers of the residence portion of the city. There were mountains behind the town, jagged sierra-like peaks with clefts and gorges between. They were terraced half-way up the sides and were covered with the light green of crops and the deeper green of forests. Tatters of mist draped them here and there, while clouds lowered in half a dozen spots, and we could see the smoky lines of as many showers in brisk operation.

On our left the shipping lay clustered about the wharfs, sending its tracery of masts into the clear sky; and all around glowed the beauty of a shallow harbor, coral-fringed. From the sapphire of the water in our immediate vicinity, the sea ranged to azure and apple green, touched by a ray of sunlight into a flashing mirror here, heaping into snow wreaths of surf there; and against this play of color loomed the swart bulk of the Pacific Mail steamer Coptic, flying her quarantine flag.

We watched the doctor’s launch go out to her, saw the flag fall and the belch of smoke as she started shoreward, while the launch came on to us. In a little while we too were creeping toward the docks. Naked Kanaka boys swam out to dive for pennies. The buildings on the shore took shape. The crowd on the dock shaped itself into a body of normal-looking beings, interspersed with ladies in kimonos who were carrying babies on their backs (the Japanese population of Honolulu is very large), and with other dark-skinned ladies in Mother Hubbards decorated with flower wreaths. There were also numerous gentlemen of a Comanche-like physiognomy, who wore ordinary dress, but were distinguished by flower wreaths in lieu of hat bands. Here and there Chinese women loafed about, wearing trousers of a kind of black oilcloth, and leading Chinese babies dressed in more colors than Joseph’s coat—grass-green, black, azure, and rose. In the background several army wagons were filled with officers in uniform and with white-clad American women.

We schoolteachers lost no time when the boat was once tied up at the dock, for it was given out that some trifling repairs were to be made to the boat’s engines and that we should sail the next day. We sailed, in point of fact, just ten days later, for the engines had to be taken down to be repaired. As the notice of departure within twenty-four hours was pasted up every day afresh, it held our enthusiasm for sight-seeing at a feverish pitch.

Our Ten Days’ Sightseeing

The Fish Market—We Are Treated to Poi—We Visit the Stores—Hawaiian Curiosities—The Southern Cross—Our Trip to the Dreadful Pali—The Rescue—The Flowers and Trees of Honolulu—The Mango Tree and Its Fruit.

My first impressions of Honolulu were disappointing. I had been, in my childhood, a fascinated peruser of Mark Twain’s “Roughing It,” and his picture of Honolulu—or rather my picture formed from his description of it—demanded something novel in foliage and architecture, and a great acreage of tropical vegetation. What we really found was a modern American city with straight streets, close-clipped lawns, and frame houses of various styles of architecture leaning chiefly to the gingerbread, and with a business centre very much like that of a Western town. Only after three or four days did the charm and individuality of Honolulu make themselves felt.

To leave the dock, we had to pass through the fish market, which looked like any other fish market, but seemed to smell worse. When we looked at the fish, however, we almost forgot the odors, for they were as many tinted as a rainbow. Coral red, silver, blue, blue shot with purple, they seemed to tell of sun-kissed haunts under wind-ruffled surfaces or of dusky caves within the underworld of branching coral. It is hard to be sentimental about fish, but for the space of two minutes and a half we quite mooned over the beauty fish of Honolulu.

Leaving the market, we came upon a ley woman who wanted to throw a heavy wreath of scented flowers about the neck of each of us at a consideration of twenty cents per capita. She was a fat old woman who used many alluring gestures and grinned coquettishly; but we were adamant to her pleadings, and seeing a street car jingling toward us—one of the bobtailed mule variety—we left her to try her wiles on a fresh group from our boat, and hailed the street car. As we entered, one passenger remarked audibly to another, “I see another transport is in,” which speech lowered my spirits fifty degrees. I hate to be so obvious.

Under that nightmare of threatened departure we went flying from place to place. In the first store which we entered we were treated to poi—a dish always offered to the stranger as a mark of hospitality—and partook of it in the national manner; that is, we stuck our forefingers in the poi, and each then sucked her own digit. Poi is made from taro root, and tastes mouldy. It is exceedingly nasty—nobody would want two dips.

The stores were just like those of the United States, and the only commercial novelties which we discovered were chains made of exquisitely tinted shells, which came from somewhere down in the South Seas, and other chains made of coral and of a berry which is hard and red and looks like coral. At the Bishop Museum, however, we found an interesting collection of Malaysian curios and products—birds, beasts, fishes, weapons, dress, and domestic utensils. Among the dress exhibits were cloaks made of yellow feathers, quite priceless (I forget how many thousand birds were killed to make each cloak); and among the household utensils were wooden bowls inlaid with human teeth. It was a humorous conceit on the part of former Hawaiian kings thus to compliment a defunct enemy.

The Pali, near Honolulu

There was a dance that night at the Hawaiian Hotel in honor of our passengers, most of whom attended, leaving me almost a solitary passenger aboard. Those happy sinners from Radcliffe went off in their best frocks. I lay in a steamer chair on the afterdeck, scanning the heavens for the Southern Cross. I counted, as nearly as I can remember, about eight arrangements of stars that might have been said to resemble crosses. Not one of them was it, however. Later, I made acquaintance with the Cross, and I must say it has been much overrated by adjective-burdened literature. It does not blaze, and it is lop-sided, and it is not magnificent in the least. It consists of five stars in the form of an irregular diamond, and it is not half so cross-like as the so-called False Cross.

Next morning the military band came down and gave us an hour’s concert on the promenade deck. We sat about under the awnings with our novels or our sewing or our attention. At the end they played the “Star Spangled Banner,” and we all stood up, the soldiers at attention, hat on breast. One of the passengers refused to take off his hat, so that we had something to gossip about for another hour.

In the afternoon we took a ride up Pacific Heights on the trolley car. Pacific Heights is a residence suburb where the houses are like those on the Peak at Hong Kong, clinging wherever they can get room on the steep sides of the mountain. The view of the city and of the blue harbor dotted with ships was beautiful. In the evening we went to a band concert in Emma Square, and on the third day made our memorable trip to the Pali.

We had been hearing of the Pali ever since we landed. It is a cliff approached by a gorge, whence one of those unpronounceable and unspellable kings once drove his enemies headlong into the sea. We could not miss a scene so provocative of sensations as this, so several of us teachers and an army nurse or two packed ourselves into a wagonette for the journey. We started bright and early, or as near bright and early as is possible when one eats in the second section and the first section sits down to breakfast at eight o’clock.

Our driver was a shrewd, kindly, gray-haired old Yankee, cherishing a true American contempt for all peoples from Asia or the south of Europe. He was conversational when we first started, but his evident desire to do the honors of Honolulu handsomely was chilled by a suggestion from one of the saints that, when we should arrive in the suburbs, he would let down the check-reins. The horses were sturdy brutes, not at all cruelly checked; but the saint could not rise superior to habit. Unfortunately she made the request with that blandly patronizing tone which in time becomes second nature to kindergartners. Its insinuating blandness ruffled our Jehu, who opined that his horses were all right, and that he could look after their comfort without any assistance. He did not say anything about old maids, but the air was surcharged with his unexpressed convictions, so that all of our cohort who were over thirty-five were reduced to a kind of abject contrition for having been born, and for having continued to live after it was assured that we were destined to remain incomplete.

We drove through the beautiful Nuuana Avenue with its velvet lawns, and magnificent trees, and then wound up the steep valley between the terraced gardens of the mountain-sides. Not a hundred yards away a shower drove by and hung a silver curtain like the gauze one which is used to help out scenic effects in a theatre; and presently another swept over us and drenched us to the skin. Half a dozen times in the upward journey we were well soaked, but we dried out again as soon as the hot sun peeped forth. We did not mind, but tucked our hats under the seats and took our drenchings in good part.

At last we arrived at a point where the road turned abruptly around a sharp peak, the approach to which led through a gorge formed by a second mountain on the left. We could tell that there was a precipice beyond, because we could see the remains of a fence which had been recently broken on the left, or outside, part of the road. The driver stopped some twenty-five or thirty yards outside the gorge, saying that he could approach no nearer, as the velocity of the wind in the cleft made it dangerous. Our subsequent experiences led me to doubt his motive in not drawing nearer, and to accredit to him a hateful spirit of revenge.

We alighted in another of those operatic showers, and made our way to the gorge, laughing and dashing the rain drops from our faces. We were not conscious of any particular force of wind, but no sooner were we within those towering walls of rock than a demon power began to tear us into pieces and to urge us in the direction of the broken fence. The first gust terrified us, and with universal feminine assent we clutched at our skirts and screamed.

The next blast sent combs and hairpins flying, drove our wet hair about our faces, and forced us to release our garments, which behaved most shockingly. I saw a kind of recess in the cliffs to the right under an overhanging shelf of rock, and, though it was approached by a mud puddle, made straight for it and in temporary quiet let go my threshing skirts and braided my hair. I could see our driver in the distance, pretending to look after his harness, and indulging in hyæna mirth at the figures we cut. Then, to make matters worse, there came a shout from the hidden road to the right, and, three abreast, a party of young civil engineers from our ship charged round the corner.

Most of our party sat down in their tracks, and a stifled but heartfelt moan escaped from more than one. I waded three inches deeper into the mud puddle and flattened myself against a wall of oozy rock with an utterly unfeminine disregard of consequences.

The men were of a thoroughly good sort, however, and, ignoring our plight, insisted on helping us round the corner. They said that, once we were out of the gorge and on the other face of the mountain, the strong draught ceased. So each woman took a frenzied grasp of her skirts, and, with an able-bodied man steadying her on each side, made the run and brought up safe on the other side. There did not seem to be much to see—nothing but the precipitous face of the cliff towering above us, the road cut out of it, winding steeply down to the right, and the shoulder of the left-hand peak running up into a cloud-swept sky. Below us was a floor of mist, swaying to unfelt airs, heaving, gray, and sad.

Just about this time a Chinaman arrived—one of the beast-of-burden sort—with two immense baskets swung across his shoulders on a bamboo pole. He made three ineffectual efforts to get round the point, but had to fall on his knees each time, as the wind threatened to sweep him too near the cliff. So the philanthropic youths went to his assistance as they had come to ours, and piloted him safely round the bend. We became so much interested in this operation and in the Chinaman’s efforts to express his thanks that we quite forgot our disappointment at the Pali’s unkind behavior. A sudden gleam of sunshine recalled us. The clouds which had been dripping down upon us were rent apart to reveal a long streamer of blue, and to give passage to a shaft of sunlight which drove resistlessly through the mist floor. The fog parted shudderingly, silently, and for a moment we looked down into a beautiful valley, green and with a thousand other tints and shades, and set in a great inward curve, beyond which the sea raced up in frothy billows to the clean white sands. Far beneath us as it was, we could detect the flashes on wet foliage; indeed, I could think of nothing but a cup of emerald rimmed with sapphire and studded with brilliants. For an all too brief space it quivered and shimmered under the sunburst, and then the mist floor closed relentlessly, the heavens grayed again, and another downpour set in.

We waited long, but the Pali declined to be wooed into sight again, nor am I certain that we were the losers thereby. The whole effect was so brief and vivid that our pleasure in it was greatly intensified. Longer vision might have brought out details which we missed, but it would have converted into the memory of a beautiful scene that which has remained a peep into fairyland.

Our return through the gorge was accompanied by all the original drawbacks. Our driver had released the check-reins of the horses, but he ostentatiously checked them up again as we appeared. He had entirely recovered his good humor, and contemplated our dishevelled appearance with secret glee.

The Pali has its good features, but it must be admitted there are drawbacks. Among the military people aboard there was a lady of uncertain age, and of a mistaken conception of what was becoming to her fading charms. She was gaunt, and leathery of skin, and she wore “baby necks” and elbow sleeves, and affected childish simplicity and perennial youth. On our first night out of Honolulu I happened to come around the corner of the promenade deck in time to observe one of the men passengers contemplating this lady, who stood at some distance from him, attired in a rather décolleté frock. The man’s attitude was a modified edition of that of the Colossus of Rhodes: He steadied a cigarette between his lips with the third and fourth fingers of his left hand, while his right hand was thrust into his trousers pocket. A peculiar expression lingered on his countenance—kind of struggle between a painful memory and a judicial estimate. He was so absorbed in his musings that he did not notice me, and he spoke aloud.

West Indian Rain-tree, or Monkey-pod Tree

“I knew she was thin,” he said, “but even with her low-necked dresses, I did not think that it was as bad as it is.”

I beat a retreat without attracting his attention, but I understood him, for I had seen him on the back seat of an army ambulance in the clutches of the perennially youthful lady, starting for the Pali.

We left Honolulu with the modified regret which always must be entertained when other lands are beckoning. The native custom of adorning departing friends with wreaths of flowers was followed, and some of our army belles were almost weighed down with circlets of blossoms cast over their heads by admiring officers of Honolulu. Once clear of the dock and out of eye range, they shamelessly cast these tokens away, and the deck stewards gathered up the perfumed heaps and threw them overboard. The favorite flowers used in these ley, or wreaths, were the creamy white blossoms with the golden centre from which the perfume frangipani is extracted. This flower is known in the Philippines as calachuchi. There were also some of the yellow, bell-shaped flowers called “campanilo,” and a variety of the hibiscus which we learned to call “coral hibiscus,” but which in the Philippines is known as arana, or spider.

The flowers of Honolulu and Manila seem very much alike. In neither place is there a wide variety of garden flowers, but there is an abundance of flowering shrubs and trees.

One quite common plant is the bougainvillaea, which climbs over trellises or trees, and covers them with its mass of magenta blossoms. The scarlet hibiscus, either single or double, and the so-called coral hibiscus grow profusely and attain the size of a large lilac bush. There is another bush which produces clusters of tiny, star-like flowers in either white or pink. It is called in the Philippines “santan,” but I do not know its name in Honolulu.

Catholic missionaries were instrumental in introducing into the Hawaiian Islands a tree of hardy and beautiful foliage which has thrived and now covers a great part of the mountain slopes. This is the algoroda tree, the drooping foliage of which is suggestive of a weeping willow. Then there is the beautiful West Indian rain-tree, which the Honolulu people call the monkey-pod tree, and which in the Philippines is miscalled acacia. Its broad branches extend outward in graceful curves, the foliage is thick but not crowded, and it is an ideal shade tree, apart from the charm of its blossoms of purplish pink.

The fire-tree and the mango are two others which are a joy to all true lovers of trees. The fire-tree is deciduous, and loses its leaves in December, In April or May, before the leaves come back, it bursts into bloom in great bunches of scarlet about the size of the flower mass of the catalpa tree. The bark is white, and as the tree attains the size of a large maple, the sight of this enormous bouquet is something to be remembered. When the leaves come back, the foliage is thick, and the general appearance of the tree is like that of a locust.

Among tropical trees, however, the most beautiful is the mango. Its shape is that of a sharply domed bowl. The leaves are glossy and thickly clustered. It is distinguishable at a long distance by its dignity and grace. But the mass of its foliage is a drawback, inasmuch as few trunks can sustain the weight; and one sees everywhere the great trunk prostrate, the roots clinging to the soil, and the upper branches doing their best to overcome the disadvantages of a recumbent position.

We ate our first mangoes in Honolulu, and were highly disgusted with them, assenting without murmur to the statement that the liking of mangoes is an acquired taste. I had a doubt, to which I did not give utterance, of ever acquiring the taste, but may as well admit that I did acquire it in time. The only American fruit resembling a mango in appearance is the western pawpaw. The mango is considerably larger than the pawpaw, and not identical in shape, though very like it in smooth, golden outer covering. When the mango is ripe, its meat is yellow and pulpy and quite fibrous near the stone, to which it adheres as does a clingstone peach. It tastes like a combination of apple, peach, pear, and apricot with a final merger of turpentine. At first the turpentine flavor so far dominates all others that the consumer is moved to throw his fruit into the nearest ditch; but in time it diminishes, and one comes to agree with the tropical races in the opinion that the mango is the king of all fruits.

From Honolulu to Manila

Voyaging over the Tropical Seas—We Touch at Guam, or Guahan, One of the Ladrone Islands—Our First Sight of the Philippines—Manila, “A Mass of Towers, Domes, and White-painted Iron Roofs Peeping Out of Green”—Dispersion of the Passengers.

From Honolulu to Guam we crept straight across in the equatorial current, blistering hot by day, a white heat haze dimming the horizon, and an oily sea, not blue, but purple, running in swells so long and gentle that one could perceive them only by watching the rail change its angle. Once we saw a whale spout; several times sharks followed us, attracted by the morning’s output of garbage; and at intervals flying fish sallied out in sprays of silver. Once or twice we passed through schools of skate, which, when they came under our lee, had a curiously dazzling and phosphorescent appearance. One of the civil engineers aboard called them phosphorescent skate, but I had my doubts, for I noticed that bits of paper cast overboard would assume the same opalescent tints when three or four feet down in the water.

We had also the full moon, leaving a great shining pathway in our wake at night, and flooding us with unreal splendor. The pale stars swung up and down as the Buford slipped over each wave, and little ripples of breeze cooled the weather side of the ship. By this time we were a thoroughly assorted company. The afterdeck was yielded to flirtatious married ladies whose husbands were awaiting them in Manila, while we sobersides and the family groups gathered under the awnings. We sang no more; but the indefatigable cornetist on the troop deck still entertained his fellows, while occasionally a second steward stole out with a mandolin, and struggled with the intermezzo from “Cavalleria.” We did not run out of talk, however, and the days went by all too swiftly.

Of Guam I can only say that it struck me as the most desolate spot I had ever seen. It stays in my memory as a long peninsula, or spit of land, running out into the sea, with a ten or twelve-foot bank above, fringed with ragged cocoanut trees. Back of this the land rose gradually into low hills. There was a road leading to the town some eight miles inland, and four-mule ambulances dashed up and down this. We had to anchor three miles off shore on account of coral reefs. We had commissary stores to land, and our navigator captain lost his temper, because the only available lighter in Guam was smashed by a falling bundle of pig iron the first thing. For a while the outlook for fresh provisions in Guam was a sorry one, for our captain vowed by all his saints that he would up anchor and away at four o’clock. The glass indicated a change of weather, and he was unwilling to risk his ship in the labyrinth of coral reefs that encircles the island. Fortunately a German tramp whaler dropped into harbor at this point for water, and some boats were obtained from her—though I could never see why, for we had plenty of our own. The unloading process went on briskly, and toward noon the U.S. gunboat Yorktown came in to pay a call; thus there were actually three vessels at one time in the harbor of Guam.

The Volcano of Mayón

Said to be the only perfect cone in the world.

Such a repletion of visitors had never been known there. The four-mule wagons seemed crazed with excitement. The enthusiasm even spread to the natives, who hung about in dug-outs, offering to sell us cocoanuts, pineapples, and green corn. Our captain kept his word, for at four o’clock we swung about and left Guam behind us. Our passenger list was richer by several political prisoners who had been in exile and were returning to their native land—whether for trial or for freedom, I have no knowledge.

Some five or six days later, it was rumored that we should pick up the light on the southeast coast of Luzon about midnight, and most of us stayed up to see it. We also indulged in the celebration without which few passenger ships can complete a long voyage. We had a paper and it was read, after which ceremonial the ship’s officers invited us to partake of sandwiches and lemonade in the dining-room. The refreshments were considerably better than the paper, which was neither wise nor witty, but abounded in those commonplace personalities to which the imagination of amateur editors usually soars.

About 2 A.M., when yawns were growing harder and harder to conceal, the light made its appearance. I counted three flashes and went below.

Next morning, we were hugging the coast of Albay abreast the volcano of Mayon, said to be the most perfect volcanic cone in the world. It seems to rise straight from the sea; with its perfectly sloping sides and a summit wreathed in delicate vapors, it is worthy of the pride with which it is regarded by the Filipinos.

Then we entered the Strait of San Bernardino, between Luzon and Samar, and passed for a day through a region of isles. The sea was glassy save when a school of porpoises tore it apart in their pursuit of the flying fish. On its deep sapphire the islands seemed to float, sometimes a mere pinnacle of rock, sometimes a cone-shaped peak timbered down to the beach where the surf fell over. Toward evening, when the breeze freshened slightly, we seemed almost to brush the sides of some of these islets, and they invited us with sparkling pools and coves, with beaches over which the sea wimpled, and with grassy hillsides running out into promontories above cliffs of volcanic rock. Thatched villages nestled in the clefts of the larger islands, or a fleet of paraos might be drawn up in a curving bay. And, yonder in the golden west, shimmering, dancing, in rosy-tinted splendor, more islands beckoned us to the final glory of a matchless day—clouds heaped on clouds, outlined in thin threads of gold, and drawing, in broad shafts of smoky flame, the vapors of an opal sea. At that time I had not seen the famous Inland Sea of Japan, but I have since passed through it twice, and feel that in beauty the Strait of San Bernardino has little to yield to her far-famed neighbor.

Next day we crept up the coast of Batangas, and when I came on deck the second morning they told me that the island on our left was Corregidor, and that Manila was three hours’ sail ahead. It was of no use going into a trance and coming up in imagination with Dewey, because he did not come our way. The entrance to Manila Bay is rather narrow, and Corregidor lies a little to one side in it like a stone blocking a doorway. The passage on the left entering the bay is called Boca Chica, or Little Mouth; that to the right is called Boca Grande, or Big Mouth. Dewey entered by the Boca Chica, and we were in Boca Grande.

View of Corregidor

By and by a cluster of roofs, church towers, docks, and arsenals took form against the sea. A little later we could discern the hulks of the Spanish fleet scattered in the water, and several of our own fighting craft at anchor. This was Cavite. There, too, around a great curve of eight or nine miles, lay Manila, a mass of towers, domes, and white-painted iron roofs peeping out of green. Behind loomed the background of mountains, without which no Filipino landscape is ever complete.

By eleven o’clock we had dropped anchor and the long voyage was over. Counting our ten days in Honolulu, we lacked but three of the forty days and forty nights in which the Lord fasted in the wilds. It would be injustice to the Buford’s well-filled larder, however, to intimate that we fasted. Our food was good, barring the ice cream, which the chef had a weakness for flavoring with rose water.

The first launch that came out after the doctor’s brought a messenger from the Educational Department with orders to us teachers to remain aboard till next day, when a special launch would be sent for us. So all day we watched our friends go down over the side, and waved farewells to them, and made engagements to meet on the Luneta. The launches and lighters and cascos swarmed round us, the cargo derricks groaned and screeched, the soldiers gathered up knapsack and canteen and marched solemnly down the ladder. Vessels steamed past us or anchored near us, while we hung over the rail, gazing at Manila, so near and yet so far. After dinner we betook ourselves to the empty afterdeck and stared down the long promenade—alas! resembling the piazza of a very empty hotel!—and peopled it with the ghosts of those who late had sat there. They had gone out of our lives after a few brief days of idleness, but they would take up, as we should, the work of building a nation in a strange land and out of a reluctant people. Some were fated to die of wounds, and some were stricken with the pestilence. Most of them are still living, moving from army post to army post. Some are still toiling in the remotenesses of mountain villages; others are dashing about Manila in the midst of its feverish society. Some have gone to swell the American colonies in Asiatic coast towns. A few have shaken the dust of the Philippines forever from their feet, and are seeking fame in the home land and wooing fortune in the traffic of great cities or in peaceful rural life. Some, perhaps, may read these lines, and, reading, pause to give a tender thought to the land which most Americans revile while they are in it, but which they sentimentally regret when they have left it.

Eight long years have slipped by since that night, and in that time a passing-bell has tolled for the Philippines which we found then. Who shall say for many a year whether the change be for better or for worse? But the change has come, and for the sake of a glamour which overlay the quaint and moribund civilization of the Philippines of that day I have chronicled in this volume my singularly unadventurous experiences.

The afterdeck was empty, and the promenade was the haunt of ghosts, but across the circle of gloom we could see a long oval of arc lights with thousands of little glow-worms beneath, which we knew were not glow-worms at all, but carriage lamps dashing round the band stand; and as if he divined our sentimental musings, the second steward took heart and not only played but sang his favorite air from “Cavalleria.”

Our First Few Days in the City

The Pasig River, With Its Swarm of House-boats—Through Manila into the Walled City—Our First Meal—A Walk and a Drive in Manila—The Admirable Policemen—We Superintend the Preparation of Quarters for Additional Teachers—That Artful Radcliffe Girl.

Our guide from the Educational Department appeared about eleven o’clock the next day, which happened to be Sunday. We and our trunks were bundled into a launch, and we left the Buford forever.

We were familiar with the magazine illustrations of the Pasig long before our pedagogic invasion of Manila, but we were unprepared for the additional charm lent to these familiar views by the play of color. The shipping was as we had imagined it—large black and gray coasters in the Hong-Kong and inter-island trade, a host of dirty little vapors (steamers) of light tonnage, and the innumerable cascos and bancas. The bancas are dug-out canoes, each paddled by a single oarsman. The casco is a lumbering hull covered over in the centre with a mat of plaited bamboo, which makes a cave-like cabin and a living room for the owner’s family. Children are born, grow up, become engaged, marry, give birth to more children—in short, spend their lives on these boats with a dog, a goat, and ten or twelve lusty game-cocks for society.

Swarming Craft on the Pasig River, Manila

The cascos lie along the bank of the river ten deep; every time a coasting steamer wants to get out, she runs afoul of them in some way, and there is a pretty mess. It always seems to turn out happily, but the excitement is great while it lasts, and it is apparently never dulled by repetition.

We swept up the Pasig with Fort Santiago and the ancient city wall on the right; and, on the left, warehouses, or bodegas, a customhouse with a gilded dome, and everywhere the faded creams and pinks of painted wooden buildings. Some of the roofs were of corrugated iron, but more were of old red Chinese tiles, with ferns and other waving green things sprouting in the cracks. The wall was completely hidden with vegetation.

We landed at the customhouse, left our trunks for inspection, and entered gig-like vehicles which were drawn by diminutive ponies and were called carromatas. Two of us were a tight fit, and, as I am stout, I was afraid to lean back lest I should drag the pony upon his hind legs, and our entrance into Manila should become an unseemly one. The carromata wheels were iron-tired, and jolted—well, like Manila street carromatas of that day. Since then a modification of the carromata and of another vehicle called calesin has been evolved. The modern conveyance has rubber tires and a better angle of adjustment, and the rat-like pony will dash about with it all day in good spirits.

We rattled up a street which I have since learned is called San Fernando, and which looks like the famous Chinatown of San Francisco, only more so. We passed over a canal spanned by a quaint stone bridge, arriving in front of the Binondo Church just as the noon hour struck. Instantly there burst out such a clamor of bells as we had never before heard—big bells and little bells, brass bells and broken bells—and brass bands lurking in unknown spots seemed to be assisting. I do not know whether the Filipinos were originally fond of noise or whether the Spaniards taught them to be so. At any rate, they both love it equally well now, and whenever the chance falls, the bells and the bands are ranged in opposition, yet bent to a common end.

The Bridge of Spain is approached from the Binondo side by almost the only steep grade to be found in Manila. I was leaning as far forward as I could, figuring upon the possible strain to be withstood by the frayed rope end which lay between us and a backward somersault, when my ears were assailed by an uncanny sound, half grunt, half moan. For an instant I thought it was the wretched pony moved to protest by the grade and my oppressive weight. But the pony was breasting the steep most gallantly, all things considered. The miserable sound was repeated a second later, just as our little four-footed friend struck the level, and I discovered that it was my driver’s appeal to his steed. It is a sound to move the pity of more than a horse; until you are thoroughly accustomed to it it leaves you under the apprehension that the cochero has been stricken with the plague. This habit of grunting at horses seems to be disappearing at the present time, the haughty customs of livery carromatas perhaps being responsible. Also English is spreading. Apart from swear words, which appear to fill a long-felt want for something emphatic, there are at least three phrases which every Filipino who has to do with horses seems to have made a part of his vocabulary. They are “Back!” “Whoa, boy!” and “Git up!” Your cochero may groan at your horse or whine at it, but when the need arises he can draw upon that much of English.

“The Rat-pony and the Two-wheeled Nightmare”

We jolted over the Bridge of Spain and through a masked gate into the walled city, with the wall on our left, and the high bricked boundaries of churches and conventos on the right, till we arrived at a low, square frame structure, with the words “Escuela Municipal” above its portals. In Spanish times it was the training-school for girls, and here temporary accommodation had been provided for us. We crossed a hall and a court where ferns and palms were growing, and were ushered into a room containing a number of four-poster beds. We were to obtain our food at a neighboring restaurant, whither we soon set out under guidance. The street was narrow, and all the houses had projecting second floors which overhung the sidewalk. Box-like shops on the ground floor were filled with cheap, unattractive-looking European wares, with here and there a restaurant displaying its viands, and attracting flies. We recognized the bananas and occasionally a pineapple, but the other fruits were new to us—lanzones in white, fuzzy clusters like giant grapes; the chico, a little brown fruit that tastes like baked apple flavored with caramel; and the atis, which most natives prise as a delicacy, but which few Americans ever learn to like.

We had been introduced to the alligator pear, the papaya, and the mango at Honolulu, but we were still expecting strange and wonderful gastronomic treats in our first Philippine meal.

We entered a stone-flagged lower hall where several shrouded carriages would have betrayed the use to which it was put had not a stable odor first betrayed it. Thence we passed up a staircase, broad and shallow, which at the top entered a long, high-ceiled room, evidently a salon in days past. It had fallen to baser uses, however, and now served as dining-room. One side gave on the court, and another on an azotea where were tropical plants and a monkey. It was a bare, cheerless apartment, hot in the unshaded light of a tropical noonday. The tables were not alluring. The waiters were American negroes. A Filipino youth, dressed in a white suit, and wearing his black hair in a pompadour, was beating out “rag time” at a cracked old piano.

“Easy is the descent into Avernus!” But there was consolation in the monkey and the azotea, though we could neither pet the one nor walk on the other. However, we were the sort of people not easily disconcerted by trifles, and we sat down still expectant.

The vegetables were canned, the milk was canned, the butter was canned, and the inference was plain that it had made the trip from Holland in a sailing vessel going around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. As for the fruits, there was but one fruit, a little acid banana full of tiny black seeds. With guava jelly it was served for dessert. Our landlord, an enterprising American, had been so far influenced by local custom that he had come to regard these two delicacies as a never inappropriate dessert. So long as we continued to “chow” with him, so long appeared the acid, flavorless banana and the gummy, sticky jelly.

In justice to Manila it must be said, however, that such conditions have long since been outlived. Good food and well-served American tables are plentiful enough in Manila to-day. The cold-storage depots provide meats and butter at prices as good as those of the home land, if not better. Manila is no longer congested with the population, both native and American, which centred there in war times. There is not the variety of fruits to be found in the United States, but there is no lack of wholesome, appetizing food.

We returned to the Escuela Municipal, and, after a nap, dressed and went out for a walk. The narrow streets with overhanging second stories; the open windows with gayly dressed girls leaning out to talk with amorous swains on the pavement below; the swarming vehicles with coachmen shouting “Ta-beh”; and the frailes (friars)—tall, thin, bearded frailes in brown garments and sandals, or rosy, clean-shaven, plump frailes in flapping white robes—all made a novel scene to our untravelled eyes. Mounting a flight of moss-grown steps, we found ourselves on top of the wall, whence we could look across the moat to the beautiful avenue, called, on the maps of Manila, the Paseo de Las Aguadas, but familiarly known as the Bagumbayan. West India rain-trees spread their broad branches over it, and all Manila seemed to be walking, riding, or driving upon it. It was the hour when everybody turns his face Luneta-ward. Seized with the longing, we too sent for a carriage.

Our coachman wore no uniform, but was resplendent in a fresh-laundered white muslin shirt which he wore outside his drill trousers. He carried us through the walled city and out by a masked gate to a drive called the Malecon, a broad, smooth roadway lined with cocoanut palms. On the bay side the waters dashed against the sea wall just as Lake Michigan does on the Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. But the view across the bay at Manila is infinitely more beautiful than that at Chicago. To the left stretches a noble curve of beach, ending with the spires and roofs of Cavite and a purple line of plateau, drawn boldly across the sky. In front there is the wide expanse of water, dotted with every variety of craft, with a lonely mountain, rising apparently straight from the sea, bulking itself in the foreground a little to the left. The mountain is in reality Mt. Marivales, the headland which forms the north entrance to Manila Bay, but it is so much higher than the sierra which runs back from it that it manages to convey a splendid picture of isolation. The sun falls behind Marivales, painting a flaming background for mountains and sea. When that smouldering curtain of night has dropped, and the sea lies glooming, and the ships of all nations swing on their anchor chains, there are few lovelier spots than the Luneta. The wind comes soft as velvet; the surf croons a lullaby, and the little toy horses and toy victorias spin up and down between the palms, settling at last around the turf oval which surrounds the bandstand.

The Luneta, Manila

Here are soldiers in clean khaki on the benches; officers of the army and navy in snow-white uniforms; Chinamen in robes of purple or blue silk, smoking in their victorias; Japanese and Chinese nursemaids in their native costumes watching their charges at play on the grass; bareheaded American women; black-haired Spanish beauties; and native women with their long, graceful necks rising from the stiff folds of azure or rose-colored kerchiefs. American officers tower by on their big horses, or American women in white drill habits. There are droves of American children on native ponies, the girls riding astride, their fat little legs in pink or blue stockings bobbing against the ponies’ sides. There are boys’ schools out for a walk in charge of shovel-hatted priests. There are demure processions of maidens from the colegios, sedately promenading two and two, with black-robed madres vainly endeavoring to intercept surreptitious glances and remarks. There are groups of Hindoos in turbans. There are Englishmen with the inevitable walking-sticks. There are friars apparently of all created orders, and there is the Manila policeman.

As I recall those early impressions, I think the awe and respect for the Manila police was quite the strongest of all. They were the picked men of the army of invasion, non-commissioned officers who could show an honorable discharge. Size must have been taken into consideration in selecting them, for I do not remember seeing one who was of less than admirable proportions. Soldierly training was in every movement.

There was none of the loafing stride characteristic of the professional roundsman. They wore gray-green khaki, tan shoes, tan leather leggings, and the military cap; and a better set up, smarter, abler body of law preservers it would be difficult to find. The “machinery of politics” had not affected them, the instinct of the soldier to do his duty was strong in them, and they would have arrested Governor William H. Taft himself as gleefully as they would have arrested a common Chinaman, had the Governor offered sufficient provocation.

We enjoyed that first night’s entertainment on the Luneta as do all who come to Manila, and I must confess that time has not staled it for me. It is cosmopolitan and yet typically Philippine. Since that day the fine Constabulary Band has come into existence, and the music has grown to be more than a mere feature of the whole scene. The concert would be well worth an admission fee and an hour’s confinement in a stuffy hall. Enjoyed in delightful pure air with a background of wonderful beauty, it is a veritable treat.

On the following day we had our interview with the Superintendent of Public Instruction. He informed us that in the course of a week the transport Thomas would arrive, carrying some five hundred or more pedagogues. He suggested that, as we were then drawing full pay, we might reimburse the Government by making ourselves useful at the Exposition Building, which was being put in order to receive them.

So to the Exposition Building we betook ourselves, and for several days made herculean efforts to induce the native boys and Chinese who were supposed to clean it up to do so properly. We also helped to put up cots and to hang mosquito nettings, and at night we lay and listened to the most vociferous concert of bull frogs, debutante frogs, tree toads, katydids, locusts, and iku lizards that ever murdered the sleep of the just. We also left an open box of candy on the table of the dormitory which we had preëmpted, starting therewith another such frantic migration in the ant world as in the human world once poured into the Klondike. They came on all trails from far and near. They invaded our beds, and when the sweets gave out, took bites out of us as the next best delicacy.

Manila seemed to be more or less excited over the new army of invasion, the local papers teeming with jokes about pretty schoolma’ams and susceptible exiles. The teachers were to land at the Anda Monument at the Pasig end of the Malecon Drive, and thence were to be conveyed to the Exposition Building in army ambulances and Doherty wagons which the military had put at the disposal of the Civil Government.

Owing to the fact that I was appointed a sort of matron to the women’s dormitory, and had to be on hand to assign the ladies to their cots and to register them, I did not go down to the Anda Monument to see the disembarkation. Plenty of people who might have pleaded less legitimate interest in the pedagogues than I had, were there, however. By half-past ten the first wagon-load had arrived at the Exposition Building in a heavy shower, and from then till early noon they continued to pour in. On the whole, they were up to a high standard—a considerably higher standard than has since been maintained in the Educational Department. The women were a shade in advance of the men.

Both men and women accepted their rough quarters with few complaints. Nearly all were obliging and ready to do their best to make up for the deficiencies in bell boys and other hotel accommodations. We arranged a plan whereby twelve women teachers were to be on duty each day,—a division of four for morning, afternoon, and evening, respectively. The number of each woman’s cot and room was placed after her name, and one teacher acted as clerk while the others played bell boy and hunted for those in demand.

And they were overworked! By five o’clock in the afternoon the parlor of the Exposition Building looked like a hotel lobby in a town where a presidential nominating convention is in session. To begin with, there were the one hundred and sixty schoolma’ams. Then the men teachers, who had been assigned to the old nipa artillery barracks, found the women’s parlors a pleasant place in which to spend an odd half-hour, and made themselves at home there. In addition, each woman seemed to have some acquaintance among the military or civil people of Manila; and officers in white and gold, and women in the creams, blues, and pinks of Filipino jusi thronged the rooms till one could hardly get through the press. Victorias and carromatas outside were crowded as carriages are about the theatres on grand opera nights at home.

It would have been difficult in all that crowd to say who was there with good and sufficient reason. Many a man drifted in and out with the hope of picking up acquaintance, and doubtless some were successful.

I was at the desk one day, doing duty for a teacher who was sick, when two forlorn but kind-looking young men approached and asked if I could tell them the names of any of the teachers from Michigan. We had a list of names arranged by States, and I at once handed this over. They pored over this long and sorrowfully. Then one heaved a sigh, and one took me into his confidence. They were from Michigan, and they had hoped to find, one or the other, an acquaintance on the list. The eagerness of this hope had even led them to bring a carriage with the ulterior motive of doing the honors of Manila if their search proved successful. Their disappointment was so heavy, and they were so naively unconscious of anything strained in the situation, that my sympathy was honest and open. But when they suggested that I introduce them to some of the women teachers from Michigan, and I declined the responsibility as gently as I could, the frigidity of their injured pride made me momentarily abject. They drifted away and hung about with expectancy printed on their faces—that and a mingled hate and defiance of the glittering uniforms which quite absorbed all feminine attention and left their civilian dulness completely overshadowed.

One of the Radcliffe maidens had an experience which goes far to show that higher culture does not eradicate the talent for duplicity for which the female sex has long been noted, and which illustrates a happy faculty of getting out of a disagreeable situation. It also illustrates a singular mingling of unsophistication and astuteness, which may be a result of collegiate training.

One of the chief difficulties which beset us was the matter of transportation. In those days there was no street-car system—or at least the apology for one which they had was not patronized by Europeans. The heat and the frequent showers made a conveyance an absolute necessity. The livery stables were not fully equal to the demand upon them, and, in addition, there was no telephone at the Exposition Building. As a consequence, we had to rely largely on street carromatas. We had a force of small boys, clad in what Mr. Kipling calls “inadequate” shirts, whose business it was to go forth in response to the command, “Busca carromata,” and to return not till accompanied by the two-wheeled nightmare and the Lilliputian pony.

On the morning on which we drew our travel-pay checks, one of the Radcliffe girls was most eager to get down town before the bank closed. The shops of Manila had been altogether too alluring for the very small balance which remained in her purse after our ten days at Honolulu. The efforts of the small boys were apparently fruitless, so she resorted to the expedient of trying to gather up a carromata from some one leaving his at the Exposition Building. Every time a carromata drove up, she thrust her cherubic countenance out of the window and inquired of its occupant whether he was going to retain his conveyance or to dismiss it. Most of the visitors signified their intentions of never letting go a carromata when once they had it; and failure had rather dimmed the bravery of her inquiry, when one young man replied that he wished to retain his carromata, but that he was returning immediately to the city and would be happy to assist her and to take her wherever she wanted to go.

The Radcliffe girl closed with this handsome offer at once, accepting it in the chummy spirit which is supposed to be generated in the atmosphere of higher culture. A more worldly-wise woman might have suspected him, not only on grounds of general masculine selfishness, but on the fact that he had no business to transact at our hostelry. He did not enter its doors, but remained sitting in the carromata till she joined him. The girl had her mind on salary, however, and had no time to question motives. The banks had closed, but her guardian angel drove her to a newspaper office, where he introduced her, vouched for her, and induced the bookkeeper to cash her check. He then expressed a desire for a recognition of his services in the form of introductions to some of the teachers at the Exposition Building. The young woman was rather taken aback, for she had put all his civility down to disinterested masculine chivalry; but she reflected that she ought to pay the price of her own rashness. She was, however, a girl of resources. She agreed to let him call that afternoon and to introduce him to some of her new friends.

Then she came home and outlined the situation to an aged woman who was chaperoning her daughter, to a widow with two children, and to an old maid in whom the desire for masculine conquest had died for want of fuel to keep the flame alive. When the young man appeared, he found this austere and unbeautiful phalanx awaiting him. When the introductions were over and conversation was proceeding as smoothly as the caller’s discomfiture would permit it to do, the artful collegian excused herself on the ground of a previous engagement. She went away blithely, leaving him in the hands of the three. Nor was he seen or heard of on those premises again. Doubtless he still thinks bitterly of the effects of higher education on the feminine temperament. It was duplicity—duplicity not to be expected of a girl who could stick her head out of a window and hail the chance passer-by as innocently as she did.

From Manila to Capiz

I Am Appointed to a School at Capiz, on Panay Island—We Anchor at the Lovely Harbor of Romblon—The Beauty of the Night Trip to Iloilo—We Halt There for a Few Days—Examples Showing That the Philippines Are a “Mañana” Country—Kindness of Some Nurses to the Teachers—An Uncomfortable Journey from Iloilo to Charming Capiz.

In due time our appointments were made, and great was the wrath that swelled about the Exposition Building! The curly-haired maiden who had fallen in love with a waiter on the Thomas wept openly on his shoulder, to the envy of staring males. A very tall young woman who was the possessor of an M.A. degree in mathematics from the University of California, and who was supposed to know more about conic sections than any woman ought to know, was sent up among the Macabebes, who may in ten generations arrive at an elementary idea of what is meant by conic sections. Whether she was embittered by the thought of her scintillations growing dull from disuse or of scintillating head axes, I know not, but she made little less than a tragedy of the matter. The amount of wire-pulling that had been going on for stations in Manila was something enormous, and the disappointment was proportionate.

I had stated that I had no choice of stations, was willing to go anywhere, and did not particularly desire to have another woman assigned with me. I had my doubts about the advisability of binding myself to live with some one whom I had known so short a time; and subsequent experience and the observation of many a quarrel grown out of the enforced companionship of two women who never had any tastes in common have convinced me that my judgment was sound. I was informed that my station would be Capiz, a town on the northern shore of Panay, once a rich and aristocratic pueblo, but now a town existing in the flavor of decayed gentility. I was eager to go, and time seemed fairly to drag until the seventh day of September, on which date the boat of the Compañia Maritima would depart for Iloilo, the first stage of our journey.

September the seventh was hot and steamy. We had endless trouble getting ourselves and our baggage to the Bridge of Spain, where the Francisco Reyes was lying. Great familiarity has since quite worn away the nervousness which we then felt on perceiving that our watches pointed to half an hour after starting time while we were yet adorning the front steps of the Exposition Building. Local boats never leave on time. From six hours to three days is a fair overtime allowance for them.

We finally arrived at the steamer in much agony and perspiration. The old saying about bustle and confusion was applicable to the Francisco Reyes if one leaves out “bustle.” There were no immediate signs of departure, but there were evidences of the eleven o’clock meal. The muchachos were setting the table under an awning on the after-deck. A hard-shell roll with a pallid centre, which tastes like “salt-rising” bread and which is locally known as bescocho, was at each plate together with the German silver knives and spoons. The inevitable cheese was on hand, strongly barricaded in a crystal dish; and when I saw the tins of guava jelly and the bunch of bananas hanging from a stanchion, I had that dinner all mapped out. I had no time, however, to speculate on its constituent elements, because my attention was attracted by the cloth with which the boy was polishing off dishes before he set them down. This rag was of a fine, sooty-black color, and had a suggestion of oil about it as if it had been on duty in the engine-room. The youth grew warm, and used it also to mop his perspiring countenance. I ceased to inspect at that point, and went forward.

The Bend in the River at Capiz

Several black and white kids of an inquisitive turn of mind were resting under my steamer chair, which had been sent on board the day before. They seemed to feel some injury at being dispossessed. I guessed at once that we carried no ice, and that the goats were a sea-faring conception of fresh meat. As their numbers diminished daily, and as we enjoyed at least twice a day a steaming platter of meat, garbanzos, peppers, onions, and tomato sauce, I have seen no reason to change my opinion.

Passengers continued to arrive until nearly two o’clock. There were one or two officers with their muchachos, and some twenty or more schoolteachers. Six were women, and we found ourselves allotted the best there was.

We got away about three o’clock, and, after fouling a line over a row of cascos and threatening their destruction, sailed down the Pasig and out into the Bay, We passed Corregidor about sunset, met a heavy sea and stiff wind outside, and I retired from society. This was Saturday night. On Sunday noon we cast anchor in the lovely harbor of Romblon, and, defying sickness, I came on deck to admire.

The harbor at Romblon resembles a lake guarded by mountains which are covered with cocoanut trees clear to their summits. At one end—the end toward the entrance, which no unfamiliar eye can detect—a great plateau mountain called Tablas stretches across the view in lengthened bulk like the sky-line of some submarine upheaval. The waters are gayly colored, shadowed into exquisite greens by the plumy mountains above; and in a little valley lies the white town of Romblon with its squat municipal buildings, its gray old church, and a graceful campanile rising from a grassy plaza. They have dammed a mountain stream, so that the town is bountifully supplied with pure cold water, and with its clean streets and whitewashed buildings, it is a most attractive place.

The inhabitants of Romblon were eager to sell us mats, or petates, the making of which is a special industry there. Their prices had suffered the rise which is an inevitable result of American occupation, and were quite beyond our means. I succeeded afterwards in getting some Romblon mats through a Filipino friend for about one-fifth the price asked that day.

Street Scene in Romblón

Our stay at Romblon was not lengthy. We got out some time in the late afternoon, and proceeded on our way. I cannot remember whether we occupied all that night and the next day in getting down to Iloilo or whether we made Iloilo in twelve hours. I do remember the night trip down the east coast of Panay, with Negros on the invisible left, and all about us a chain of little islands where the fisher folk were engaged in their night work of spearing fish by torchlight. Dim mountainous shapes would rise out of the sea and loom vaguely in the starlit distance, the curving beaches at their bases outlined by the torches in the bancas till they looked like boulevards with their lines of flickering lamps. I remember that we fell to singing, and that after we had sung everything we knew, an officer of the First Infantry who was going back to his regiment after a wound and a siege in hospital said enthusiastically: “Oh, don’t stop. You don’t know how it sounds to hear a whole lot of American men and women singing together.”

It was somewhere between ten and midnight when a light flashed ahead, and beyond it lay a little maze of twinkles that they said was Iloilo. The anchor chains ran out with a clang and rattle, for our Spanish captain took no chances, and would not pick his way through the Siete Pecadores at night.

The Siete Pecadores, or Seven Sinners, are a group of islands, or rocks—for they amount to little more than that—some six miles north of Iloilo, just at the head of Guimaras Strait. On the east the long, narrow island of Guimaras, hilly and beautifully wooded, lies like a wedge between Panay and Negros. Beyond it the seven-thousand-foot volcano, Canlaon, on Negros, lifts a purple head. On the west lies the swampy foreshore of Panay with a mountain range inland, daring the sunlight with scarpy flanks, on which every ravine and every cleft are sunk in shadows of violet and pink. The water of the straits is glassy and full of jelly-fish, some of the white dome-like kind, but more of the purple ones that float on the water like a petalled flower.

Iloilo was a miniature edition of Manila, save that there were more gardens and that there was a rural atmosphere such as is characteristic of small towns in the States. The toy horses and the toy carromatas and quilices were there, and the four-horse wagons with a staring “U. S.” on their blue sides. There were the same dusky crowds in transparent garments, the soldiers in khaki, the bugle calls, and the Stars and Stripes fluttering from all the public buildings.

As Iloilo was not well supplied with hotels, we women were barracked in a new house belonging to the American Treasurer, whose family had not yet arrived from the States, We found our old friend, the army cot, borrowed from the military quartermaster. There was a sitting-room well equipped with chairs and tables. Our meals were obtained from a neighboring boarding-house which rejoiced in the name “American Restaurant,” and was kept by a Filipina. She was a good soul, and had learned how to make cocoanut balls, so that we bade a glad adieu to the bananas and guava jelly.

Our own particular waitress was a ten-year-old child, who said “hello” and smoked a cigar as long as herself. In a moment of enthusiasm one of our number who was interested in temperance and its allied reforms tipped Basilia a whole Mexican media-peseta. When the reformer became aware of Basilia’s predilection for the weed, she wanted her media-peseta back, but Basilia was too keen a financier for that. The media-peseta was hers—given in the presence of witnesses—and she somewhat ostentatiously blew smoke rings when she found the reformer’s eye fixed upon her.

At Iloilo we picked up the word tao, which means “man,” especially “laboring man,” for the Filipinos usually fall back upon the Spanish words caballero and señor to designate the fortunate individuals whose hands are unstained with toil. We had picked up the vernacular of the street carromata in Manila. This is very simple. It consists of sigue, para, derecho, mano, and silla. For the benefit of such readers as do not understand pidgin Spanish, it may be explained that these words signify, respectively, “go on,” “stop,” “straight ahead,” “to the right,” and “to the left.” The words mano and silla mean really “hand” and “saddle”; I have been told that they are linguistic survivals of the days when women, rode on pillions and the fair incubus indicated that she wished to turn either to the side of her right hand or to the skirt side.

By this time we had begun to understand—just to understand in infinitely small proportion—what the old resident Americans meant when they joked about the Philippines as a mañana country. When we inquired when a boat would be in, the reply was “Seguro mañana”—“To-morrow for sure.” When would it leave? “Seguro mañana.” Nothing annoys or embarrasses a Filipino more than the American habit of railing at luck or of berating the unfortunate purveyor of disappointing news, or, in fact, of insisting on accurate information if it can be obtained. They are ready to say anything at a minute’s notice. A friend of mine in Ilocos Norte once lost a ring, and asked her servant if he knew anything about it. The boy replied instantly, “Seguro raton,” which is an elliptical form of “Surely a rat ate it.” The boy had not stolen the ring, but he jumped at anything to head off complaint or investigation.

Time is apparently of no value in the Philippines. On the second day of our stay in Iloilo the Treasurer sent up two pieces of furniture for our use, a wardrobe and a table. They were delivered just before lunch, about ten o’clock, and the Treasurer would not be at home to sign for them till nearly one. When I came in from a shopping expedition, I found eight or ten taos sitting placidly on their heels in the front yard, while the two pieces of new furniture were lying in the mud just as they had been dumped when the bearers eased their shoulders from the poles. The noonday heat waxed fiercer, and the Treasurer was delayed, but nobody displayed any impatience. The men continued to sit on their heels, to chew their betel nut, and to smoke their cigars, and, I verily believe, would have watched the sun set before they would have left. In an hour or so the Treasurer appeared, and settled the account, the taos picked up the furniture and deposited it in the house, and the object lesson was over.

In spite of shopping, time hung somewhat heavy on our hands at Iloilo. We made few acquaintances, for there were few civilian women, and the army ladies, so we were informed, looked askance at schoolteachers, and had determined that we were not to be admitted into “society.” The army nurses asked us to five o’clock tea, and we went and enjoyed it. They were, for the most part, gentlewomen born, and the self-sacrifice of their daily lives had accentuated their native refinement. I have few remembrances more pleasant than those of the half-hour we spent in their cool sala. As for the tea they gave us and the delicious toast, mere words are inadequate to describe them. We became sensible that the art of cooking had not vanished from the earth. After the garbanzos and the bescochos and the guava jelly, how good they tasted!

In the course of two or three days we were notified that the vapor General Blanco would leave for Capiz on Saturday at five P.M., and some ten or twelve of us, destined for the province of that name, made ready to depart. I was the only woman in the party, but our Division Superintendent, who was personally conducting us and who was having some little difficulty with his charges, assured me that I was a deal less worry to him than some of the men were. I told him that I was quite equal to getting myself and my luggage aboard the Blanco. I had employed a native servant who said he knew how to cook, and I was taking him up to Capiz with an eye to future comfort. Romoldo went out and got a carabao cart, heaping it with my trunks, deck chair, and boxes. I followed in a quilez, and we rattled down to the wharf in good time.

The General Blanco was not of a size to make her conspicuous, and I reflected that, if there had been another stage to the journey and a proportional shrinkage in the vessel, it surely would have had to be accomplished in a scow. Although by no means palatial, the Buford was a fair-sized, ocean-going steamer. The Francisco Reyes was a dirty old tub with pretensions to the contrary; and the General Blanco—well, metaphorically speaking, the General Blanco was a coal scuttle. She was a supercilious-looking craft, sitting at a rakish angle, her engines being aft. She had a freeboard of six or seven feet, and possessed neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you could go inside and sit on a coal pile. There was a bridge approached by a rickety stair, and I judged that my deck chair would fill it completely, leaving about six inches for the captain’s promenade. Behind the superstructure there was a sort of after-deck, nearly four feet of it. When my trunks and boxes had been piled up there, with the deck chair balancing precariously atop, and with Romoldo reclining luxuriously in it, his distraught pompadour was about on a level with the top of the smokestack.

I really didn’t see any room aboard for me, and sat down on a hemp bale to consider. Shortly after, the Division Superintendent arrived, accompanied by several young men. He looked blank, and they whistled. Then he went on board to talk with the captain, while his assembled charges continued to ornament the hemp bales. Filipinos of all ages and sizes gathered round to stare and to comment.

At last the Division Superintendent came back with the information that the Blanco would tow up a lorcha which was lying a little distance down the river, and that we should find her a roomier and cooler means of transportation than the steamer. “Lorcha” is the name given to the local sailing vessels. Our lorcha was about sixty feet long, and, according to one of the teachers who had once seen Lake Michigan, was “schooner rigged.” There was a deck house aft, which was converted into a stateroom for me. There were two bunks in it, each of which I declined to patronize. Instead I had my steamer chair brought over, and found there was plenty of room for it. There were little sliding windows, which with the open door afforded fairly decent ventilation. But the helm was just behind the deck house, and the helmsman either sat or stood on the roof, so that all night his responses to the steersman on the Blanco interfered with my sleep. Then, too, they kept their spare lanterns and their cocoanut oil and some coils of rope in there. At intervals soft-footed natives came in, and I was never certain whether it was to slay me or to get some of their stores. Once a figure blocked out the starlight at one of the windows, and I heard a rustling and shuffling on the shelf where my food tins were piled. So I said, “Sigue! Vamos!” and the figure disappeared.

The men opened their army cots on the forward deck, where the big sail cut them off from the rest of the ship. The next morning they reported a fine night’s rest. I could not make so felicitous a report, for my stateroom was considerably warmer than the open air, and a steamer chair, though comfortable by day, does not make an acceptable bed.

We breakfasted from our private stores, and I found myself longing for hot coffee, instead of which I had to drink evaporated milk diluted with mineral water. The day was sunny, the heat beat fiercely off the water, and I burned abominably. Near noon we sighted a town close to the coast, and knew that we were nearing our journey’s end.

We skirted the horn of a crescent-shaped bay, found a river’s mouth, and entered. Here at least was the tropical scene of my imagination—a tide-swollen current, its marshy banks covered with strange foliage, and innumerable water lanes leading out of it into palmy depths. Down these lanes came bancas, sometimes with a single occupant paddling at the stern, sometimes with a whole family sitting motionless on their heels. Once we passed the ruins of what had been a sugar mill or a bino factory—probably the latter. Then the Blanco, puffing ahead, whistled twice, we rounded a curve and came full upon the town.

Though subsequent familiarity has brought to my notice many details that I then overlooked, that first impression was the one of greatest charm, and the one I love best to remember. There were the great, square, white-painted, red-tiled houses lining both banks of the river; the picturesque groups beating their clothes on the flat steps which led down to the water; and the sprawling wooden bridge in the distance where the stream made an abrupt sweep to the right.

On the left of the bridge was a grassy plaza shaded with almond trees, a stately church, several squat stone buildings which I knew for jail and municipal quarters, and a flag staff with the Stars and Stripes whipping the breeze from its top. Over all hung a sky dazzlingly blue and an atmosphere crystal clear. Back of the town a low unforested mountain heaved a grassy shoulder above the palms, and far off there was a violet tracery of more mountains.

I knew that I should like Capiz.

My First Experiences As a Teacher of Filipinos

After Resting in a Saloon I Arrive at My Lodging—I Attend an Evening Party—Filipino Babies—I Take Temporary Charge of the Boys’ School—How the Opening of the Girls’ School Was Announced—Curiosity of the Natives Regarding the New School—Difficulty of Securing Order at First.

The municipality of Capiz was expecting a woman teacher, for cries of “La maestra!” began to resound before the boat was properly snubbed up to the bank; and when I walked ashore on a plank ten inches wide, there had already assembled a considerable crowd to witness that feat. They gathered round and continued to stare when I was seated in the principal saloon. Meanwhile a messenger was sent to find the American man teacher, who had been notified by telegram to arrange for my accommodation. The saloon was a very innocent-looking one, so that I mistook it for a grocery storeroom. Such as it was, it represented the best the Filipinos could do in the saloon line. One sees, in Manila and, for that matter, all up and down the Chinese and Japanese coasts, the typical groggery of America with somebody’s “Place” printed large over the entrance, and a painted screen blocking the doorway with its suggestions of unseemliness. But the provincial saloon is still essentially Spanish—a clean, light room with no reservations, the array of bottles on the shelves smiling down on the little green cloth-covered tables where the domino and card games go on. There may be an ancient billiard table in one corner with its accompanying cue rack, and there is almost sure to be a little hole in the ceiling through which the proprietor’s wife, who resides above, can peep down and watch the card games. It is a genuine family resort, too, for between four and seven all the town is likely to drop in, the women chaffering or gossiping while their lords enjoy a glass of beer and a game of dominoes.

The proprietor’s wife must have had a fine look at me as I sat mopping my sunburned face. At last the American teacher came, a pleasant-faced young man who spoke Spanish excellently and was quite an adept at the vernacular. In due time I was ushered into a room in a house on the far side of the river, the window of which commanded a fine view of the bridge, the plaza, the gray old church, and the jail, with the excitements of guard mount and retreat thrown in.

The room had a floor of boards, each one of which was at least two feet wide. They were rudely nailed and were separated by dirt-filled cracks, but were polished into a dark richness by long rubbing with petroleum and banana leaves. The furnishings consisted of a wardrobe, a table, a washstand, several chairs, and a Filipino four-poster bed with a mattress of plaited rattan such as we find in cane-seated chairs. A snow-white valence draped the bed. The mattress was covered with a petate, or native mat, and there were two pillows—a big, fat, bolstery one, and another, called abrazador, which is used for a leg-rest.

I bathed in the provincial bathroom. Manila, being the metropolis of the Philippines, has running water and the regular tub and shower baths in tiled rooms. The Capiz bathroom had a floor of bamboo strips which kept me constantly in agony lest somebody should stray beneath, and which even made me feel apologetic toward the pigs rooting below. There was a tinaja, or earthenware jar, holding about twenty gallons of water, and a dipper made of a polished cocoanut shell. I poured water over my body till the contents of the tinaja were exhausted and I was cool. Already I was beginning to look upon a bath from the native standpoint as a means of coolness, and incidentally of cleanliness.

When I got back to my room, my hostess and her sister came and sat with me while I unpacked my trunk and applied cold cream to my sunburnt skin. They were afraid that I should be triste because I was so far from home and alone, and they inquired if I wanted a woman servant to sleep in my room at night. I was quite unconscious that this was an effort to rehabilitate their conception of the creature feminine and the violated proprieties; and my indignant disclaimer of anything bordering on nervousness did not raise me in their estimation.

They left me finally in time to permit me to dress and gain the sala when the bugles sounded retreat. The atmosphere was golden-moted—swimming in the incomparable amber of a tropical evening. The river slipped along, giving the sense of rest and peace which water in shadow always imparts, and as the long-drawn-out notes were caught and flung back by the echo from the mountains, the flag fluttered down as if reluctant to leave so gentle a scene. When the “Angelus” rang just afterwards, it was as if some benignant fairy had waved her wand over the land to hold it at its sweetest moment. The criss-crossing crowds on the plaza paused for a reverent moment; the people in the room stood up, and when the bell stopped ringing, said briskly to me and to one another, “Good evening.” Then the members of the family approached its oldest representative and kissed his hand. It was all very pretty and very effective.

Afterwards we went out for a walk—at least they invited me to go for a walk, though it was a party to which we were bound. Filipinos, being devout Catholics, have a fashion of naming their children after the saints, and, instead of celebrating the children’s birthdays, celebrate the saints’ days. As there is a saint for every day in the year, and some to spare, and it is a point of pride with every one of any social pretension whatever to be at home to his friends on his patron saint’s day, and to do that which we vulgarly term “set ’em up” most liberally, there is more social diversion going on in a small Filipino town than would be found in one of corresponding size in America. At these functions the crowd is apt to be thickest from four till eight, the official calling hours in the Philippines.

Starting out, therefore, at half-past six, we found the parlors of the house well thronged. At the head of the stairs was a sort of anteroom filled with men smoking. This antesala, as they call it, gave on the sala, or drawing-room proper, which was a large apartment lighted by a hanging chandelier of cut glass, holding about a dozen petroleum lamps. Two rows of chairs, facing each other, were occupied by ladies in silken skirts of brilliant hues, and in camisas and pañuelos of delicate embroidered or hand-painted piña. We made a solemn entry, and passed up the aisle doing a sort of Roger de Coverley figure in turning first to one side and then to the other to shake hands. No names were mentioned. Our hostess said, by way of general announcement, “La maestra,” and having started me up the maze left me to unwind myself. So I zigzagged along with a hand-shake and a decorous “Buenas noches” to everybody till I found myself at the end of the line at an open window. Here one of those little oblong tables, across which the Filipinos are fond of talking, separated me from a lady, unquestionably of the white races, who received the distinction of personal mention. She was “la Gobernadora,” and her husband, a fat Chino mestizo, was immediately brought forward and introduced as “el Gobernador.” He was a man of education and polish, having spent fourteen years in school in Spain, where he married his wife. After having welcomed me properly, he betook himself to the room at the head of the stairs where the men were congregated. A fat native priest in a greasy old cassock seemed the centre of jollity there, and he alternately joked with the men and stopped to extend his hand to the children who went up and kissed it.

I did my best to converse intelligently with the Gobernadora and the other ladies who were within conversational distance. A band came up outside and played “Just One Girl,” and presently one of the ladies of the house invited the Governor’s wife and me to partake of sweets. We went out to the dining-room, where a table was laid with snow-white cloth, and prettily decorated with flowers and with crystal dishes containing goodies.

There were, first of all, meringues, which we call French kisses, the favorite sweet here. There was also flaon, which we would call baked custard. In the absence of ovens they do not bake it, but they boil it in a mould like an ice-cream brick. They line the mould with caramel, and the custard comes out golden brown, smooth as satin, and delicately flavored with the caramel. Then there was nata, which is like boiled custard unboiled, and there were all sorts of crystallized fruits—pineapple, lemon, orange, and citron, together with that peculiar one they call santol. There were also the transparent, jelly-like seeds of the nipa palm, boiled in syrup till they looked like magnified balls of sago or tapioca.

I partook of these rich delicacies, though my soul was hungering for a piece of broiled steak, and I accepted a glass of muscatel, which is the accepted ladies’ wine here. My hostesses were eager that I should try all kinds of foods, and a refusal to accept met with a protest, “Otra clase, otra clase.” Then the Gobernadora and I went back to the sala, and another group took our places at the refreshment table.

I was much interested in the babies, who were strutting about in their finest raiment and were unquestionably annoyed at its restrictions. Filipino babies are sharp-eyed, black-polled, attractive little creatures. Whether of high or low degree, their ordinary dress is adapted to the climate, and consists usually of a single low-necked garment, which drapes itself picturesquely across the shoulders like the cloaks of Louis the Fourteenth’s time seen on the stage.

On state occasions, however, they are inducted into raiment which their deluded mothers fancy is European and stylish; but there is always something wrong. Either one little ruffled drawers leg sags down, or the petticoat is longer than the dress skirt, or the waistband is too tight, or mamma has failed to make allowance in the underclothing for the gauziness of the outer sheathing. As for the sashes with which the victims are finally bound, they fret the little swelled stomachs, and the baby goes about tugging at his undesirable adornment, and wearing the frown of one harassed past endurance. Sometimes it ends in flat mutiny, and baby is shorn of his grandeur, and prances innocently back into the heart of society, clad in a combination of waist and drawers which is associated in my memory with cotton flannel and winter nights. Nobody is at all embarrassed by the negligée; and as for the baby himself, he would appear in the garments of Eve before the Fall without a qualm.

After everybody had been served with sweets, a young Filipina was led to the piano. She played with remarkable technique and skill. Another young lady sang very badly. Filipinos have natural good taste in music, have quick musical ears, and a natural sense of time, but they have voices of small range and compass, and what voice they have they misuse shamefully. They also undertake to sing music altogether too difficult for any but professionals.

Church, Plaza, and Public Buildings, Capiz

When the music was over, I was rather anxiously anticipating a “recitation,” but was overjoyed to discover that that resource of rural entertainment has no foothold in the Philippines. Dancing was next in order. The first dance was the stately rigodon, which is almost the only square dance used here. When it was finished and a waltz had begun, I insisted on going home, for I was tired out. Somebody loaned us a victoria, and thus the trip was short. A deep-mouthed bell in the church tower rang out ten slow strokes as I threw back the shutters after putting out my light. The military bugles took up the sound with “taps,” and the figure of the sentry on the bridge was a moving patch of black in the moonlight.

The Division Superintendent started inland the next morning to place the men teachers in their stations, and as he required the services of the American teacher in interpreting, I was told to go over and take charge of the boys’ school, at that time the only one organized.

I went across the plaza and found two one-story buildings of stone with an American flag floating over one, and a noise which resembled the din of a boiler factory issuing from it. The noise was the vociferous outcry of one hundred and eighty-nine Filipino youths engaged in study or at least in a high, throaty clamor, over and over again, of their assigned lessons. When I went in, they rose electrically, and shrieked as by one impulse, “Good morning, modham.” They were so delighted at my surprise at their facility with English that they gave it to me over and over again, and I saw that they had intuitions of three cheers and a tiger.

When I had explained to the teacher that I was there to relieve him, he explained it to the boys, and they replied with the same unanimity and the same robustness of voice, “Yis, all ri’!” So he went away, leaving me in charge of the boiler factory.

It stays in my recollection as the most strenuous five hours’ labor I ever put in. Only two personalities were impressive, those of the pupil teacher who aided me, and who has since graduated from the University of Michigan (agricultural department), and of a very small boy who had possessed himself of a wooden box, once the receptacle of forty-eight tins of condensed milk, which he used for a seat. He carried the box with him when he went from one place to another, and more than one fight was generated by his plutocracy. He also sang “Suwanee River” in a clear but sweet nasal voice, and was evidently regarded as the show pupil of the school.

The school was popular not only with boys but with goats. Flocks of them wandered in, coming through the doors or jumping through the windows. I soon found that Filipino children are more matter-of-fact than American children. Nobody giggled when our four-footed friends came in, and until I gave an order to expel them their presence was accepted as a matter of course. When I suggested putting them out, I found the Filipino youth ready enough at rough play. The first charge nearly swept me off my feet, and turned the school into a pandemonium. After that the goats were allowed to assist in the classes at their pleasure.

During the next three days, what with the labor of school and the fatigue of entertaining most of the population of Capiz during calling hours, I was almost worn out. The Division Superintendent came back the latter part of the week, and the Presidente, or mayor, sent out, at his request, a bandillo to announce the opening of a girls’ school.

The bandillo corresponds to the colonial institution of the town crier. It consists usually of three native police, armed with most ferocious-looking revolvers, and preceded by a temporary guest of municipal hospitality from the local calabozo. This citizen, generally ragged and dirty and smoking a big cigar, is provided with a drum which he beats lustily. The people flock to doors and windows, and the curious and the little boys and girls who are carrying their baby relations cross saddle on their hips, fall in behind as for a circus procession. At every corner they stop, and the middle policeman reads the announcement aloud from a paper. Then the march is taken up again by those who desire to continue, and the rest race back to their doorways to wag their tongues over the news. The bandillo makes the rounds of the town and returns to the municipal hall whence it started. The prisoner goes back to jail, the police lay aside their bloodthirsty revolvers, and such is the rapidity with which news flies in the Philippines that, in a little more than twenty-four hours, the essentials of the bandillo may be known all over the province.

In spite of the bandillo I waited long for a pupil on the day of opening my school. My little friend of the milk box deserted his own classes and stationed himself at my door. After an interminable time he thrust his head inside the door and announced, “One pupil, letty.”

It was a very small girl in a long skirt with a train a yard long and with a gauzy camisa and pañuelo—a most comical little caricature of womanhood. She was speechless with fright, but came on so recklessly that I began to suspect the cause of her determination. It was, in truth, behind her as my groom of the front yard soon let me know. Again the elfin face and the wiry pompadour leaned round the door-jamb—“One more pupil, letty,—dthe girl’s modther.”

But she was not a pupil, of course, and she had only come in response to the heart promptings of motherhood, white, black, or brown, to talk about her offspring to the strange woman who was to usurp a mother’s place with her so many hours of each day. She was quite as voluble as American mothers are, and her daughter was quite embarrassed by her volubility. The child sat stealing frightened glances at me and resentful ones at her mother.

Half an hour later, three more girls came in, and they continued to drop in during the rest of the morning till I had forty-five enrolled. Some of them were accompanied by their dogs, which curled up under the benches without disturbance. Several nursemaids also happened along to give their charges a peep at the American school, and a crowd of citizens peered in at doors and windows and made audible remarks about the new institution.

Within a few days the enrolment ran up to one hundred and forty-nine. As this was too large a body to be handled by me alone, the teacher of Spanish days was brought back to the school, pending the arrival of more teachers from the States. She was a plump, middle-aged body who had a little—a very little—English, but whose ideas of discipline, recitation, and study were too well fixed to permit of accommodation to our methods. She was unfailingly polite and kind, though I could see that she was often harassed by the innovations to which she could not accustom herself.

The school-house was one immense room, and one of the first acts of the Division Superintendent was to set in motion the forces which should separate it into three. This took time. First the Presidente had to approve, and the town council to act on his suggestion. The Municipal Treasurer, a native official, had to certify the cost to the Provincial Treasurer, an American civil appointee, and if the last-named official approved, the council could make the appropriation and order the work done.

Pending these changes, the Filipino teacher took one end of the room and I the other. We were sufficiently far apart not to interfere with each other’s recitations. In order that all the pupils should have their reading and grammar recitations under my personal supervision, we changed classes at intervals. For the sake of the drill, I made the children move from one part of the room to the other, instead of changing with the other teacher myself. We made great efforts to accomplish this movement with order and decorum, but the result at first was a fizzle. The double column always began to move with dignity, but by the time it had advanced ten steps, excitement began to wax, the march became a hurry, the hurry grew to a rush, and the rush ended in a wild scramble for front seats. One little maid in particular was such an invariable holder of an advantageous position that my curiosity was aroused to see how she did it. I watched her, saw her glistening brown body—perfectly visible through the filmy material of her single garment—dive under the last row of seats and emerge triumphant at the front while the press was still blocking the aisles.

Disorder and excitement were, however, mere temporary conditions. Under repeated admonition and practice, the Filipino children moved about with more order and regularity, the habit of studying aloud was overcome, and the school began to show the organization and discipline to which Americans are accustomed.

The hardest thing to overcome was their desire to aid me in matters that I could manage better alone. If some one whispered and I tapped a pencil, instantly half the children in the room would turn around and utter the hiss with which they invoke silence, or else they would begin to scold the offender in the vernacular. Such acts led, of course, to unutterable confusion, and I had no little trouble in putting a stop to them.

An Analysis of Filipino Character

American Pupils and Filipino Pupils Contrasted—The Filipinos’ Belief That They Are Highly Developed Musicians—Their Morbid Sensitiveness to Criticism—Explanation of Their Desire for Education—Their Belief That They Could Achieve Great Success in Manufactures, Arts, and Literature If Left to Govern Themselves—Their Lack of Creative Ability—Dillettanteism of Leading Filipinos—Manual Jealousies of the People—Lack of Real Democratic Spirit in America—The Pride of Filipino Men Compared to That of American Women.

So long as they find firmness and justice in the teacher, Filipino children are far easier to discipline than are American children. At the first sign of weakness in the teacher or in the Government which is behind him, they are infinitely more unruly and arrogant than are the children of our own race. There is, in even the most truculent American child, a sense of the eternal fitness of things which the Filipino lacks. American children are restless and mischievous. They are on the alert for any sign of overstepping the limits of lawful authority on the part of the teacher, and they have no compunctions about forcing him to recognize that he rules by the consent of the governed, and that he must not mistake their complaisance for servility. On the other hand, they have, with rare exceptions, a respect for the value of a teacher’s opinion in the subjects which he teaches, and will seldom contradict or oppose him in matters that pertain wholly to learning. A class of American children which would support in every possible way one of their number in defying authority would not hesitate to make that same companion’s life a burden to him if he should set up his own opinion on abstract matters in contradiction to his teacher’s. Except when a teacher signally proves his incapacity, American children are willing to grant the broad premise that he knows more than they do, and that, if he does not, he at least ought to know more. Filipino children reverse this attitude. They are quite docile, seldom think of disputing authority as applied to discipline, but they will naively cling to a position and dispute both fact and philosophy in the face of quoted authority, or explanation, or even of sarcasm. The following anecdote illustrates this peculiarity. It happened in my own school and is at first hand.

One of the American teachers was training a Filipino boy to make a recitation. The boy had adopted a plan of lifting one hand in an impassioned gesture, holding it a moment, and of letting it drop, only to repeat the movement with the other hand. After he had prolonged this action, in spite of frequent criticism, till he looked like a fragment of the ballet of “La Poupée,” the teacher lost patience.

“Domingo,” she said, “I have told you again and again not to make those pointless, mechanical gestures. Why do you do it? They are inappropriate and artificial, and they make you look like a fool.”

Domingo paused and contemplated her with the pity which Filipinos often display for our artistic inappreciativeness.

“Madame,” he replied in a pained voice, “you surprise me. Those gestures are not foolishness. They are talent. I thought they would please you.”

In my own early days I was once criticised by one of the young ladies of Capiz for my pronunciation of the letter c in the Spanish word ciudad. I replied that my giving the sound of th to the letter was correct Spanish, whereupon she advised me to pay no attention to the Spanish pronunciation, as the Filipinos speak better Spanish than do the Spanish themselves. What she meant was that the avoidance of th sounds in c and z, which the Filipinos invariably pronounce like s, is an improvement to the Spanish language. I imagined some of that young lady’s kindred ten years later arguing to prove that the Filipino corruption of th in English words—pronouncing “thirty” as “sirty,” and “thick” as “sick”—arguing that such English is superior to English as we speak it. Here are some typically mispronounced English sentences: “If Maria has seben fencils and see loses sree, see will hab four fencils left, and if her moser gibs her eight fencils, see will hab twel’ fencils in all.” Here is another: “Pedro has a new fair of voots.” Another: “If one fint ob binegar costs fi’ cents, sree fints will cost sree times fi’ cents, or fikteen cents.” It would, I think, be hard to convince us that the euphonic changes in these words are an improvement to our language.

Some four years ago, I was teaching a class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, and was giving some directions about the word form of English sentences. I advised the class to stick to simple direct sentences, since they would never have any use for a literary style in English. Some six or eight young men instantly dissented from this proposition, and insisted that they were capable of acquiring the best literary style. Not one of them could have written a page of clear, grammatical, idiomatic English. I tried to make it clear to them that literary English and colloquial English are two different things, and that what they needed was plain, precise English as a medium of exchange in business, and I said, incidentally, that such was the English possessed by the major portion of the English-speaking race. I said that although the American nation numbered eighty millions, most of whom were educated and able to make an intelligent use of their language in conversation or in writing, the percentage of great writers and speakers always had been small and always would be so.

When I had finished, the son of a local editor, arose and replied as follows: “Yes, madame, what you say of Americans is true. But we are different. We are a literary people. We are only eight millions, but we have hundreds and thousands of orators. We have the literary sense for all languages.”

Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a pupil in the Kansas City, Missouri, High School, the stepson of a United States Circuit judge made a brutally rude and insubordinate reply to a woman teacher who said to him, in reference to an excuse which he had given for tardiness, “That is not a good excuse.” The young man turned an insolent eye upon the teacher—a gray-haired woman—and replied, “It’s good enough for me. What are you going to do about it?”

The Home of an American Schoolteacher

I cannot conceive that a Filipino child would be guilty of such insolence, such defiance of decency and order. But never have I met an American child who would have the artless indiscretion to put himself in the position of Domingo. The American child does not mind violating a rule. He is chary of criticising its propriety or its value. In other words, the American child does not mind doing wrong, but he is wary of making a fool of himself; and I have yet to meet the Filipino child who entertained the faintest suspicion that it was possible for him to make a fool of himself. Nor is the attitude of dissent among Filipinos limited to those who express themselves. It is sometimes very trying to feel that after long-winded eloquence, after citation and demonstration, you have made no more real impression upon the silent than upon the talkative, and that, indeed, the gentle reserve of some of your auditors is based upon the conviction that your own position is the result of indomitable ignorance. One of my friends has met this spirit in a class in the Manila High School. A certain boy insists that he has seen the iron head of a thunderbolt, and although he makes “passing grades” in physics, he does not believe in physics. He regards our explanations of the phenomena of lightning as a parcel of foolishness in no wise to stand the test of his own experience, and nothing can silence him. “But, ma’am,” he says, when electricity is under discussion, “I am see the head of a thunder under our house.” This young gentleman will graduate in a year or two, and the tourist from the States will look over the course of study of the Manila High School and go home telling his brethren that the Filipino children are able to compete successfully with American youth in the studies of a secondary education. I myself had a heart-breaking time with a sixth-grade class in one of the intermediate schools of Manila. The children had been studying animal life and plant life, and could talk most learnedly about anthropoid apes, and “habitats” and other things; but they undertook to convince me that Filipino divers can stay under water an hour without any diving apparatus, and that the reason for this power is that the diver is “brother to a snake”—that is, that when the mother gave birth to the child, she gave birth to a snake also, and that some mysterious power remains in persons so born.

Filipino children are not restless and have no tradition of enmity between teacher and pupil to urge them into petty wrong-doing. Their attitude toward the teacher is a very kindly one, and they are almost uniformly courteous. Their powers of concentration are not equal to those of American children, and they cannot be forced into a temporarily heavy grind, but neither do they suffer from the extremes of indolence and application which are the penalty of the nervous energy of our own race. They are attentive (which the American child is not) but not retentive, and they can keep up a steady, even pull at regular tasks, especially in routine work, at which American children usually rebel. In fact, they prefer routine work to variety, and grow discouraged quickly when they have to puzzle out things for themselves. They will faithfully memorize pages and pages of matter which they do not understand, a task at which our nervous American children would completely fail. They are exceedingly sensitive to criticism, and respond quickly to praise. Unfortunately the narrow experience of the race, and the isolation and the general ignorance of the country, make praise a dangerous weapon in the hands of a teacher; for a child is apt to educe a positive and not a relative meaning from the compliment. Filipino children have not attained the mental state of being able to qualify in innumerable degrees. If a teacher hands back a composition to an American boy with the words “Well done,” the child understands perfectly that his instructor means well as compared with the work of his classmates. The Filipino is inclined to think that she means positively well done—above the average for all the world. I once complimented a class in Capiz on the ease with which they sang four-part music, and said, what I truly feel, that the Filipinos are a people of unusual musical ability. They managed to extract from the compliment the idea that the musical development of the Filipinos is far in advance of that of the Americans.

Middle-class Filipinos have a very inadequate conception of the tremendous wealth of artistic, literary, and musical talent interwoven with the world’s development, and are especially inclined to pride themselves upon their racial excellence in these lines, where, in truth, they have achieved almost no development whatever in spite of the possession of undoubted talent. They do not understand the value of long training, and are inclined to assume that the mere possession of a creative instinct is final evidence of excellence in any art.

It will be some time before what real talent they have will make itself felt in any line, because it will take a great deal of tactful handling to make them reveal their natural artistic trend instead of falling into imitation of Europe and America. It is strange that a people so tenacious of its opinions with regard to matters of fact should be so willing to surrender its ideal with regard to the thing of which a nation has most reason to be tenacious, its natural expression. But the whole race is so morbidly sensitive to the sneer that everything Filipino is necessarily crude that the young art student or the young musical student feels that his only hope of winning commendation is in painting or playing or composing after European models; while as for the populace at large it has its own standards in which other motives than artistic excellence play the largest part.

I had a friend, a young Filipino girl, who has been one of the most diligent among the pupils of the American schools. She was staying with me two or three years ago when my publisher sent me a copy of a primer intended for use in the Philippines, and which had just been gotten out in the United States. The publisher had spared no expense in his illustrations, and we were tremendously proud of the artistic side of the book. This Filipino girl had heard me use the expression “poor white trash,” and I had explained to her how the Southern negroes use the words as a term of derision of those who fail to live up to the traditions of race and family. When I took my book to her in the joy of an author in her first complete production, she looked at it a minute and burst into tears. “Poor Filipino trash!” was all she could say for a long time, and I finally pieced it out that she was enraged because the Filipino boys and girls in my book were sometimes barefooted, sometimes clad in chinelas, and wore native camisas instead of American suits and dresses. I pointed out to her that not one Filipino child in a hundred dresses otherwise, but my argument was of no avail. The children in the American readers wore natty jackets and hats and high-heeled shoes, and winter wraps, even at play, and she wanted the Filipino children to look the same.

A great deal has been said in the American press about the eagerness for education here. The desire for education, however, does not come from any real dissatisfaction which the Filipinos have with themselves, but from eagerness to confute the reproach which has been heaped upon them of being unprogressive and uneducated. It is an abnormal condition, the result of association of a people naturally proud and sensitive with a people proud and arrogant. At present the desire for progress in things educational and even in things material is more or less ineffective because it is fed from race sensitiveness rather than from genuine discontent with the existing order of things. The educated classes of Filipinos are not at all dissatisfied with the kind and quality of education which they possess; agriculturists are not dissatisfied with their agricultural implements; the artisans are not, as a class, dissatisfied with their tools or ashamed of their labor. If you talk to a Filipino carpenter about the carefully constructed houses of America, he does not sigh. He merely says, “That is very good for America, but here different custom,” Filipino cooks are not dissatisfied with the terrible fugons which fill their eyes with smoke and blacken the cooking utensils, and have to be fanned and puffed at every few minutes and occasionally set the house on fire. The natural causes of growth are not widely existent, and it is still problematic if they will ever come into being. Meanwhile growth goes on stimulated by the eternal criticism, the sting of which the Filipinos would move heaven and earth to escape.

Our own national progress and that of the European nations from whom we are descended have been so differently conceived and developed that we can hardly realize the peculiar process through which Filipinos are passing. We cannot conceive of Robert Fulton tearing his hair and undertaking a course in mechanics with the ulterior view of inventing something to prove that the American race is an inventive one. We cannot imagine Eli Whitney buried in thought, wondering how he could make a cotton gin to disprove the statement that the Americans are an unprogressive people. Cyrus Hall McCormick did not go out and manufacture a reaper because he was infuriated by a German newspaper taunt that the Americans were backward in agriculture. Nor can we fancy that John Hay while dealing with the Chinese crisis in 1900 was continually distracting his mind from the tremendously grave points at issue by wondering if he could not do something a little cleverer than the other diplomats would do.

All the natural laws of development are turned around in the Philippines, and motives which should belong to the crowning years of a nation’s life seem to have become mixed in at the beginning—a condition, due, of course, to the fact that the Filipinos began the march of progress at a time when the telegraph and the cable and books and newspapers and globe-trotters submitted their early development to a harrowing comparison and observation. The Filipino is like an orphan baby, not allowed to have his cramps and colic and to cut his teeth in the decent retirement of the parental nursery, but dragged out instead into distressing publicity, told that his wails are louder, his digestive habits more uncertain, his milk teeth more unsatisfactory, than the wails or the digestive habits or the milk teeth of any other baby that ever went through the developing process. Naturally he is self-conscious, and—let us be truthful—not having been a very promising baby from the beginning, both he and his nurses have had a hard time.

However, turned around or not, we are not responsible for the condition. The Filipinos had arrived at the self-conscious stage before we came here, and we have had to accept the situation and make the best of it.

The American press of Manila, with the very best of intentions, has indulged itself in much editorial comment, and the more the condition of things is discussed, the more the native press strengthens in its quick sensitiveness. The present attitude of the upper, or governing, class of Filipinos is this: “We want the best of everything in the world—of education, of morals, of business methods, of social polish, of literature, art, and music, of roads and bridges, of agricultural machinery, and of local transportation, and we can attain these things.” They have laid down in the beginning a premise for which no inductive process can be found as justification,—that the Filipino people is capable of doing anything which any other nation has done; and that, given time and opportunity—especially the opportunity of managing their own process of development—they will demonstrate their capacity. The flat contradiction of this position which is not infrequently taken by Americans in discussing Filipinos is, of course, as extreme as the Filipino position itself, and, as an observer, I have little to do with either. But at the present time I do feel warranted in stating that the mass of intelligent Filipinos fail to distinguish between critical or appreciative ability and real creative ability, and that what they are acquiring in huge doses just now is the critical and not the creative. Moreover, of the great body of persons who make the demand for the best, only a very few have any idea of what is the best except in book learning and social polish. The prominent men among the Filipinos to-day are those who were educated in Europe or in Filipino schools modelled on European patterns. Their idea of education is a social one—an education which fits a man to be considered a gentleman and to be an adornment to the society of his peers. They have no conception of the American specialization idea in education which grants a doctor’s degree to a man who says “would have went” and “He come to my house yesterday.” The Filipino leaders have a perfectly clear idea of what they want educationally, of what they consider the best, and they are jealously watching the educational department to see that they get it. The American press urges more and more manual training, and the Filipino press, because manual training is in the list of things marked “best,” echoes the general call. But there is no small body of hobbyists in the Islands keeping a jealous eye on the manual-training department of education. It could be dropped out of the curriculum by simply allowing it to become less and less effectual, and so long as no formal announcement was made the Filipinos would not find out what was being done. But in Manila and in most provincial towns there are enough Filipinos who know what musical instruction is to watch that the musical training be not too badly administered.

There is plenty of complaint about the Sanitary System of Manila, there are plenty of people to complain about what is being done, but there is no small organized body of Filipinos whose paramount interest in life is fixed upon sanitation and health, and who make it their thankless task to harry the department and to preach ceaselessly at the unthinking public till they get what they want. The legislators of the Philippines are gentlemen born, men educated in conformity to the ideals of education in aristocratic countries, but unfortunately they have not had, owing to the political conditions which have prevailed here, the practical experience of an aristocratic body in other lands. In Mrs. Ward’s “William Ashe” there is an analysis of a gouty and rather stupid old statesman, who is so exactly a summary of what a Filipino statesman is not that I cannot forbear quoting it here:

“He possessed that narrow, but still most serviceable fund of human experience which the English land-owner, while our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape if he will. As guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord lieutenant, member (for the sake of his name and his acres) of various important commissions, as military attaché even for a short time to an important embassy, he had acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had often envied him—a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct both for men and affairs which were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons.”

The only large practical experience which Filipino leaders have enjoyed has come through their being land-owners and agriculturists. But agriculture has not been competitive; and when the land-owning class travelled, it was chiefly in Spain, which can hardly be called a progressive agricultural country. Of men of the artisan class who have worked their way up by their own efforts from ignorance to education, from poverty to riches; of men who have had any large available experience in manual labor or in specialised industries, the present Assembly feels the lack. The Filipino leaders are a body of polished gentlemen, more versed in law than in anything else, with varying side lines of dilettante tastes in numerous directions.

A Characteristic Group of Filipino Students

Such as they are, the schoolboy desires to be. One of the periodic frenzies of the local American press is an appeal to teachers—why are they not remodelling character, why do not the aims and ideals which it is their business to instil make a greater showing after ten years of American occupation? American teachers have talked themselves hoarse, and as far as talking can go, they have influenced ideals. The child’s conscious ideal about which he talks in public, and to which he devotes about one one-thousandth of his thinking time, is some such person as George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or James A. Garfield, who drove the canal boat and rose to be President of the United States. But the subconscious ideal which is always in his mind, upon which he patterns unthinkingly his speech and his manners and his dreams of success, is—and it would be unnatural if it were otherwise—some local potentate who will not carry home his own little bag of Conant currency when he receives his salary at the end of the month. What are a name and a few moral platitudes about a dead-and-gone hero? What can they mean to a shirtless urchin with a hungry stomach, against the patent object-lesson of his own countryman whom not only his fellow citizens, but the invader, must treat with consideration? It would be far easier to distract the attention of the children of the State of Ohio from their distinguished fellow-citizens, William H. Taft and John D. Rockefeller, to fix it upon the late Lord Cromer or that Earl of Halifax known as the “Trimmer,” than it is to tell a Filipino child that the way to distinction lies through toil and sweat. Children are very patient about listening to talk, but they are going to pattern themselves upon what is obvious. Twenty or thirty years from now, when the American school system will have aided certain sons of the people, men of elemental strength, to bully and fight their way to the front, and they will have become the evidence that we were telling the truth—then will the results be visible in more things than in annual school commencements and in an increase in the output of stenographers and bookkeepers.

The weakest point in a Filipino child’s character is his quick jealousy and his pride. His jealousy is of the sort constitutionally inimical to solidarity. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, the Filipinos are more aristocratic in their theories of life than we are, and more democratic in their individual constitution. Our democracy has always been tempered by common sense and practicality. We like to say at church that all men are brothers, and on the Fourth of July to declare that they are born free and equal; but we do not undertake to put these theories into practice. Every individual citizen of the United States is not walking about with a harrowing dread of doing something that admits a lesser self-esteem than his neighbor may possess. If a fire breaks out in his neighborhood, and a little action on his part can stop it before it gets a dangerous start, he does not hesitate to act for fear doing so will show him possessed of less personal pride than his neighbor up the street. If he is earning sixty dollars a month, and learns that some other employee in another house is getting more money for the same work, he does not take the chances of starvation because to submit to the condition is to admit that he is less important than another man. Yet the whole laboring element of the Filipino people is permeated by just such a spirit. It is practically impossible to fix a price for labor or for produce by any of the laws of supply and demand that regulate such things elsewhere. The personal jealousies, the personal assertions of individuals continually interfere with the normal conditions of trade. If in the market some American comes along in a hurry and pays a peso for a fish, the normal price of which is about thirty-five cents, the price of fish goes up all through the market—for Americans. You may offer eighty cents and be refused, and the owner will sell two minutes after to a Filipino for thirty-five. But in so doing he does not “lose his face.” The other man got a peso from an American, and a man who takes less—from an American—is owning himself less able than his companions.

We talk of democracy, but we never know how little democratic we are till we come in contact with the real article. Can you conceive what would be the commercial chaos of America to-morrow if the humblest laborer had the quick personal pride of the millionaire? With all our alleged democracy, we realize the impossibility of ringing Mrs. Vanderbilt’s doorbell and asking her to sell us a few flowers from her conservatory or to direct us to a good dressmaker, though we can take just such liberties with houses where the evidences that money would be welcome are patent.

The American laborer does not mind going to and from his work in laboring clothes, and he makes no attempt to seem anything but a laboring man. But you cannot tell in a Manila street car whether the white-clad man at your side is a government clerk at sixty pesos a month or a day laborer at fifteen. I once lost a servant because I commanded him to carry some clothes to my laundress. “Go on the street with a bundle of clothes, and get into the street car with them! I would rather die!” he said; and he quitted rather than do it.

Compare that with the average common-sense attitude of the American laboring man or even the professional man. Until he becomes really a great man and lives in the white light of publicity, the American citizen does not concern himself with his conduct at all as it relates to his personal importance. He is likely to argue that he cannot do certain things which violate his ideal of manhood, or other things which are inconsistent in a member of the church, or other things which are unworthy of a democrat, or of a member of the school board, or even of an “all-round sport.” Whatever the prohibitive walls which hedge the freedom of his conduct, each is a perfectly defined one, a standard of conduct definitely outlined in his mind, to which he has pledged his allegiance; but he has no large conception that most useful things are forbidden pleasures to him because of a sense of personal importance. He has no God of the “I,” no feeling that makes him stay his hand at helping a cochero to free a fallen and injured horse, while he looks to see that some other man of his class is helping also.

There is a perfectly defined class system in the Philippines, and, between class and class, feeling is not bitter; but within each class jealousy is rampant. The Filipino, though greatly influenced by personality, does not yet conceive of a leadership based upon personality to which loyalty must be unswervingly paid. He feels the charm of personality, he yields to it just so long as it falls in with his own ideas, but the moment it crosses his own assertiveness he is ready to revolt. Many Americans speak of this characteristic as if it were a twist in character. My own opinion is that it is a passing phase, due to the Filipino’s lack of the “narrow, but most serviceable fund of human experience.” But no matter to what cause the condition is due, it makes a great difference in the life of the individual and of the social body as a whole that each unit has fixed his ideal of conduct upon an illimitable consciousness of personal importance, instead of upon perfectly defined ideals in particular matters. It makes for femininity in the race.

If the reader will meditate a little upon the difference between masculine pride and feminine pride in America, he will probably agree with me that masculine pride centres largely in loyalty to well-defined ideals of what is manly, or honorable, or bold, or just, or religious—in short, it tries to live up to the requirements of a hundred separate standards. On the other hand, feminine pride, outside of its adherence to what is chaste and womanly, consists of pride in self, a kind of self-estimate, based frequently upon social position, sometimes on a consciousness of self-importance which comes through the admiration of men. In either case the pride is likely to show itself in a jealous exaction of consideration for the individual. Such is Filipino pride. It is almost wholly concerned in guarding its vested rights, in demanding and exacting the consideration due the importance of its possessor.

Filipinos are hard to enlist in any new undertaking until they are certain that success will bring “consideration.” They love newspaper notices and publicity, they love the centre of the stage, and every new advance in intelligence is bulwarked by a disproportional demand for “consideration.”

Filipino men are not lacking in manly qualities. They have the stronger courage, the relatively stronger will and passions which distinguish the men of our own race. But they are harder to get along with than are Filipino women, because their sense of sex importance is so much exaggerated, and because, as Mr. Kipling would put it, they “have too much ego in their cosmos.” The secret consciousness of power is not enough for them. They must flash it every minute in your eyes, that you may not forget to yield the adulation due to power. Like women, they get heady on a small allowance of power; and indeed in both sexes there are emphasized certain characteristics which we are accustomed to look upon as feminine. Their pride is feminine as I have analyzed it. They rely upon intuition to guide them more than upon analysis. In enlisting coöperation, even in public matters, they are likely to appeal to a sentiment of friendship for themselves instead of demonstrating the abstract superiority of their cause. They will make a haughty public demand, but will not scruple to support it with secret petition and appeal. They are adepts at playing upon the weakness and petty vanity of others; and they deal gently with the strong, but boldly with the weak. Both men and women possess an abundance of sexual jealousy, and have, in addition, the quick sensitiveness about rank, worldly possessions, and precedence which with us has become the reproach of the feminine. Lastly, they have, in its highest development, the capacity to make a volte-face with grace and equanimity. They are cunning, but not shrewd; their reasoning is wholly deductive, they are inclined to an enthusiastic assent to large statements, especially when these take the form of moral or political truisms; but they do not submit their convictions to practical working tests. They seem often inconsistent, but observation will show that, however inconsistent their practice is with their professions, it is always consistent with their pride, as I have analyzed it in these pages.

My Early Experiences in Housekeeping

I Set Up Housekeeping—Romoldo’s Ideas of Arranging Furniture—My Cheerful Environment—Romoldo’s Success in Making “Hankeys”—He Introduces the Orphan Tikkia as His Assistant—The Romance of Romoldo and Tikkia.

At the period of my advent in Capiz there were but two other American women there, wives of military men. Later our numbers were increased by the wives of several civilian employees and two more women teachers. In those first days the hospitality of the military women made no small break in the routine of my daily life. At the time of our appointment we teachers had been assured by a circular from the War Department that we should enjoy the privileges of the military commissary; but this ruling had been changed in the several months that had elapsed, and I found myself stranded with practically no access to American tinned fruits and vegetables. I ate rice, fish, and bananas with the best grace I could; and when, after a month of boarding, I decided to set up housekeeping, and one of these ladies surreptitiously and with fear and trembling presented me with a can of concentrated lye, my gratitude knew no bounds. My Filipino servant, named Romoldo, whom I had dubbed “The Magnificent,” was set to work cleaning up my prospective dwelling; and I went out and secured the services of a trooper of the Tenth Cavalry to supplement the deficiencies in Romoldo’s housecleaning instincts by some American brawn and muscle.

The trooper, a coal-black African, had picked up a great deal of Spanish, which he spoke with the corruption of vowel sounds peculiar to his race and color. In addition to collecting the stipend agreed upon, he incidentally borrowed two dollars (U.S.) of me. Now, I was brought up in Missouri and knew enough of the colored race to be sure that I was bidding a fond adieu to the two dollars when I handed them to the trooper. But I was not prepared for my henchman’s persistence in having the extension of time made formal. I was willing to forget the two dollars and have done with them, but the African would not permit them to rest in peace. He presented himself regularly every two weeks to ask for another fortnight’s extension. Finally, when the regiment was about to leave the Islands, I insisted that he should accept the two dollars as an evidence of my good-will toward the United States Army and the defenders of the flag, and he was graciously pleased so to do.

The trooper’s muscles were strong as his habits of renewal, and he and Romoldo scoured the floors of my new establishment until the shiny black accretions of twenty-five years of petroleum and dirt had given way to unpolished roughness, and then I set to work to get a new polish. Then we took hold of the furniture—heavy, wooden, Viennese stuff—and scrubbed it with zeal. My landlord came to look in occasionally and was hurt. He said plaintively that they had had no contagious diseases, and he asked why this deluge of soap and water. I basely declined to admit the flat truth, which was that the floors and chairs were too greasy for my taste, but attributed our energy to a mad American zeal for scouring. He said, “Ah, costumbre!” and seemed to feel that the personal sting of my actions had been removed.

In due time the house was clean, and I moved in. The sala, or drawing-room, was at least forty by thirty feet, with two sides arcaded and filled with shell windows, which, when drawn back, gave the room almost the open-air effect of a gallery. It was furnished with two large gilt mirrors, a patriarchal cane-seated sofa, several wooden armchairs, eleven majolica pedestals for holding jardinières, and two very small tables. These last-named articles “the Magnificent” placed at the head of the apartment in such a position as to divide its cross wall into thirds, and then arranged all the chairs in two rows leading from the two tables, beginning with the most patriarchal armchair and ending with the dining-room chair, the leg of which was tied on with a string. The effect was rigidly mathematical; and when my landlady came in and adorned each table with a potted rose geranium, stuck all over with the halves of empty egg-shells to give it the appearance of flowering, I felt that it was time to assert myself. The egg-shells went promptly into the garbage box, and the chairs and tables were pulled about to achieve the unpremeditated effect of our own rooms. Then I went out for a walk, and returning found that Romoldo had restored things to his own taste. Again I broke up his formation, so the next time he tried a new device. He put one table at the top of the room and one at the bottom, with the chairs arranged in a circle around each one. This gave the pleasing impression to one entering the room that a card game was ready to begin. Again Romoldo’s efforts were treated with contempt.

For at least two weeks a deadly combat went on between Romoldo and me, in which I finally came off victor. At the end of that time he seemed to have accustomed himself to our ideas of decoration. He had, in our week’s deluging, cleaned up the lamps of the chandeliers, brushed down the cobwebs, and removed some half-dozen baskets of faded and dust-laden paper flowers. He administered the ironical consolation meanwhile that their destruction did not matter, since my admiring pupils would see that the supply was renewed. To my eternal sorrow he was a true prophet, and I had to contemplate green chrysanthemums and blue roses, and a particularly offensive hand-painted basket made of plates of split shell. However, the potted palms and ferns with which I ornamented the eleven pedestals made atonement; and when I came in after a hard day’s work and saw the unreal, golden-tinted light of afternoon filling the dignified old room, I found it home-like and lovely in spite of the paper flowers and the shell basket.

My bedroom was half as large as the sala, with a small room adjoining it which I used for a dining-room, and at the back there were a kitchen, a bathroom, closets, and a bamboo porch. For this shelter, furnished as it was, I paid the munificent sum of twenty-five pesos Mexican currency, or twelve and one-half dollars gold per month.

As my house was located over the second saloon in town—one of the regular, innocent, grocery-looking Filipino breed—and as it commanded a fine view of the plaza, guard mount, retreat, and Sunday morning church procession, I had at least all the excitement that was going in Capiz. The American soldiers swore picturesquely over their domino and billiard games down stairs; the “ruffle of drums” (though why so called I know not, for it consists of a blare of trumpets) woke up the sultry stillness at nine A.M.; the great church-bells struck the hours and threw in a frenzy of noise on their own account at some six or eight regular periods during the day; at twelve, noon, the village band stationed itself on the plaza to run a lively opposition to the bells; and at sunset the charming ceremony of retreat brought us all out to see the flag drop down, and to hear the clear, long bugle notes; and there were sick call, mess call, and several other calls. Not the least beautiful of these was “taps.” I used to wait for it in the perfect stillness of starlit nights when the Filipinos had all gone to bed, and the houses were ever so faintly revealed by the lanterns burning dimly in front, and the faintest gleam told where the river was slipping by. There would be no sound save the step of the trumpeter picking his way up the street. Then the church clock would strike—not the ordinary bell, but a deep-throated one that could have been heard for miles—and as the vibrations of the last stroke died away, the first high-pitched, sweet notes would ring out, to fade away in the ineffable sadness of the closing strain.

But if there was much that was novel and more that was noisy in those first experiences, there was also plenty of irritation. As I stated before, I had brought Romoldo from Iloilo to Capiz with the idea of using him for a cook. In the days when I was still boarding, he had confirmed me in this intention by stating that he had had experience in that line with an American army officer. He was particularly enthusiastic over his achievements with “hankeys.” For a long while, I could make nothing of this word, but at last I discovered that it was his corruption of “pancakes.” I found out this fact by asking Romoldo to explain how he made “hankeys,” and by recognizing among his ingredients milk, eggs, and flour.

As the Filipina with whom I boarded professed to be eager to learn American cookery, I told Romoldo to make some “hankeys.” In the language of Virgil, I “shudder to relate” what those “hankeys” were. There were three, nicely piled on top of one another, after our time-honored custom. No words could fitly describe them. They resembled unleavened bread, soaked in a clarifying liquid, heated, pressed down, and polished on both sides. The Filipina tried to conceal her disgust, and pretended to accept my explanation that they were only a caricature of our loved breakfast delicacy; but I could see that she thought I was trying to cover up my newly acquired sense of national deficiency.

However, when I set up housekeeping, Romoldo was promoted to the office of chief cook and only bottle washer. He conveyed to me a delicate intimation that it was not proper for me to live without a female attendant, and said that he had a friend—a young woman lately orphaned—who needed work and would be glad to have the position. I was sufficiently unsophisticated in Filipino ways to take this statement at its face value. As the orphan was willing to labor for a consideration of one dollar gold per month and room, the experiment could not be an expensive one.

The orphan duly arrived, escorted by Romoldo. He carried her trunk also, consisting of several garments tied up in a cotton handkerchief.

Her name, as Romoldo pronounced it, was Tikkia (probably Eustaquia), and I could have wished she had been handsomer and younger. She was a heavy-browed, pock-marked female, with a mass of cocoanut-oiled tresses streaming down her back, and one leg, bare from the knee down, rather obtrusively displaying its skinny shin where her dress skirt was looped up and tucked in at the waist. She had no petticoat, and her white chemisette ended two inches below the waist line. As it was not belted down, it crept out and lent a comical suggestion of zouave jacket to the camisa, or waist, of sinamay (a kind of native cloth made of hemp fibres). She understood not one word of Spanish or English.

When I occupied my new home for the first night, I “ordered” fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner, and then went out in the kitchen and cooked them. The army quartermaster had loaned me a range. Romoldo displayed an intelligent interest in the cooking lesson, but Tikkia seemed bored. When the potatoes were done, I gave them to Tikkia to mash. Romoldo was in the dining-room, setting the table. I told her in my best mixed Spanish and Visayan to mash them, and then to put them on the stove a few minutes in order to dry out any water in them. She understood just that one word “water”; and when I returned, after being out of the kitchen a minute, the potatoes were swimming in a quart of liquid. So I dined on fried chicken.

For the first two or three weeks there were many ludicrous accidents in my kitchen and some irritating ones. But on the whole Romoldo took hold of things very well; and though my menu broadened gradually, it was not long before he had learned a few simple dishes, and my labor of supervision was much lighter. I said that I was pleased with Romoldo to the enlisted man who was in charge of the officers’ mess and who incidentally made some market purchases for me. He said, “You ain’t particular,” with a finality that left me no defence. He was mistaken, however. I am particular, but at that time I was still in the somnambulance of philanthropy which brought us pedagogues to the Philippines.

I am willing to admit to-day that I vastly overrated Romoldo’s services, and yet, considering the untutored state of his mind and the extent of his salary, they were a good investment. There has been among some Americans here a carping and antagonistic spirit displayed toward Filipinos, which reflects little credit upon our national consistency or charity. We have a habit of uttering generalities about one race on the authority of a single instance; whereas, with our own, the tendency is to throw out of consideration those single instances in which the actual, undeniable practice of the American is a direct confutation of what his countrymen declare is the race standard. My kitchen under Romoldo’s touches was not perfect, but I have seen worse in my native land.

Romoldo being a young and rather attractive man, and Tikkia such a female pirate, I insist that my failure to suspect a romance is at least partially justified; and certainly never by word or glance did they betray the least interest in each other. But some days after my establishment had begun to run smoothly, one of the military ladies asked me to dinner. The punkah string was pulled by a murderous-looking ex-insurrecto, who fixed me with a basilisk glance, half entreaty, half reproach. It became so painful that toward the end of dinner I asked my hostess if his expression was due to his general frame of mind or to a special aversion toward pedagogues. She replied that he was probably bracing himself to approach me on a topic consuming his very vitals, or as much of them, at least, as may be expressed in absent-mindedness. Tikkia was his matrimonio, and I, the maestra had taken her and given her to Romoldo, and the twain lived in my house! The lady added that Tikkia was not matrimonio en iglesia—that is, married in church—but only matrimonio pro tem.

Pedro came into the sala after dinner and made his petition with humility. He extolled his kindness to the ungrateful Tikkia, and denounced Romoldo as a fiend and liar. He tried hard to weep, but did not succeed.

0 tempora! O mores! Such are the broadening effects of travel and two short months in the Orient. Conceive of the old maid schoolteacher in America assuming the position of judge in a matrimonial—or extra-matrimonial—scandal of this sort.

I promised justice to the sniffling Pedro, and told him to call for it next day at ten A.M. Like me, he supposed it would take the form of Tikkia. But when I reached home and summoned the culprits before the bar of a “moral middle class,” they were not disconcerted in the least. Romoldo stood upon high moral ground. Tikkia might or might not be married. It was nothing to him, and he did not know. She was an orphan of his acquaintance to whom he wished to do a kindness. Tikkia promptly drew up her skirt over the unexposed knee and showed a filthy sore which she said was caused by Pedro’s playful habit of dragging her about on stony ground by the hair. Moreover she stood upon her legal rights. She was not matrimonio en iglesia, and she had a right to leave Pedro when she chose.

Pedro came next day at ten A.M., but he did not get justice. On the contrary, justice, as embodied in Tikkia, stood at the head of the stairs and said, “No quiero” as often as I (and Pedro) turned our imploring eyes upon her.

Things went on in this way for some time, and my perplexities offered amusement to my friends. I felt sure that Romoldo and Tikkia were lying, and at one time I resolved to discharge them both. The young American teacher who had been in the Islands since the beginning of our occupation gave me some sound advice. He said: “What on earth are these people’s morals to you? Romoldo is a good servant. He speaks Spanish, and if you let him go for one who speaks only Visayan, your own housekeeping difficulties will be greatly increased.” Then I pleaded the old-fashioned rural American fear that people might think the worse of me for keeping such a pair in my employ; and Mr. S—— simply collapsed. He sat and laughed in my face till I laughed too. “We are not in America now,” was his parting remark; and I am still learning what a variety of moral degeneration that sentence was created to excuse.

I have already given more space than is warranted by good taste to the romance of Tikkia and Romoldo. The affair went on till I began to fear lest Pedro, in one of the attacks of jealousy to which Filipinos are subject, should take vengeance and a bolo in his own hands. Fortunately, at the critical moment, Romoldo and Tikkia fell out. She kicked his guitar off the back porch and he complained that she neglected her work. Then she asked leave to return to her own town for a few days, and the request was joyfully granted. Pedro also obtained a vacation. Their town was round the corner one block away, and there they retired. They greeted me pleasantly whenever I passed by, and Tikkia seemed in no wise embarrassed by her change of front.

If I have described this incident in full, it is because it illustrates so perfectly the attitude of a large portion of the Filipino people on marriage. The common people seldom marry except, as we would term it, by the common-law marriage. When they do marry in church, it is quite as much for the éclat of the function as for conscientious reasons. Marriage in the church costs usually eight pesos (four dollars gold), though cheaper on Sundays, and to achieve it is quite a mark of financial prosperity.

Of course, among the educated classes our own view of marriage prevails, though I have heard of instances where the common-law form was still observed. In some towns it is customary for marriages to take place but once a year; an American told me of descending on a mountain town where the annual wedding festival was due, and of finding fifty-two happy couples in their gala attire wending a decorous procession toward the church.

Filipino Youths and Maidens

Manners and Social Condition of Filipino Girls—Sentimental Boy Lovers—Love-making by Proxy—How Courtship is Usually Performed—Premature Adolescence of Filipino Youth—The Boda Americana—Filipino Girls Are Coquettes, But Not Flirts—Exposure of Filipino Girls to Unchaste Conversation—Unceasing Watchfulness over Girls—Progressive Changes in All the Above Matters.

With regard to their women the Filipinos are an Occidental people rather than an Oriental one. Marriage is frequently entered upon at the will of the parent, but few parents will insist upon a marriage where the girl objects. While the social liberty accorded a young girl is much less than what is permitted in our own country, there is no Oriental seclusion of women. Children accompany their parents to balls and fiestas, and maidens are permitted to mingle freely in society from their baby-hood. At fourteen or fifteen they enter formally into society and begin to receive attentions from men. In the upper classes seventeen or eighteen is the usual time for marriage. By the time a girl is twenty-two or twenty-three she is counted passée, and, if unmarried, must retire into the background in favor of her younger sisters.