AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN THE PHILIPPINES

First Edition July 1906

Reprinted October 1906

AN ENGLISHWOMAN
IN THE
PHILIPPINES

BY MRS CAMPBELL DAUNCEY

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1906

Printed in Great Britain

INTRODUCTION

In the following letters, written during a stay of nine months in the Philippine Islands, I tried to convey to those at home a faithful impression of the country I was in and the people I met. Since I came home I have been advised to collect and prepare certain of my letters for publication, and this I have done to the best of my ability, though with considerable misgivings as to the fate of such a humble little volume.

It is impossible to mention the Philippine Islands, either in daily life in the country itself, or in describing such life, without reference to the political situations which form the topic of most conversations in that uneasy land. On this subject also I wrote to the best of my power, faithfully and impartially; for I hold no brief for the Americans or the Filipinos. I merely aimed at a plain account of those scenes and conversations, generally written within a few hours of my observing them, which, it seemed to me, would best convey a true and unbiassed impression of what I saw of the Philippines as they are.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN THE PHILIPPINES

LETTER I.
MANILA

Manila, 27th November 1904.

We arrived here early yesterday morning from Hong Kong, after three days of rather a horrible sea voyage, as the steamer was more than crowded, the weather rough, and we carried a deck cargo of cattle. These conditions are not unusual, however, in fact I believe they are unvarying, as the 362 miles of sea between here and Hong Kong are always choppy, and the two mail steamers that ply to and fro, the Rubi and the Zafiro, are always crammed full, and invariably carry cattle.

The poor beasts stood in rows of pens on the main deck, each fitting tightly into his pen like a bean in a pod; many of them were ill, and one died. We watched the simple funeral with great interest, for the crew hoisted the dead animal by means of a crane, with a rope lashed round its horns, standing on the living beasts on each side to do it; but they had a good deal of difficulty in extracting the body from its pen, in which it was wedged sideways by two live neighbours, who stubbornly resented the whole affair. Finally, with a great deal of advice and swearing, the carcase was slung over the side, and it looked very weird sailing down the ship’s wake in the sunset.

That was the only event of the voyage, till we sighted Luzon, the biggest and most northern of the Philippines, some time on Saturday afternoon—this is Monday, by-the-bye.

The Zafiro kept all along the coast, which loomed up dim and mountainous, but we could not see anything very clearly, for the atmosphere was thick and hazy. Here and there on the darkening mountain sides a column of smoke rose up very straight into the evening air, and I was told they came from forest clearings, but we saw no signs of human habitation. A man who had been many years in the Philippines, and was returning to what had become his home, told me that such fires on the mountain sides had been used a great deal as signals between the insurgents during the Spanish and the American wars, and had been made to indicate all manner of gruesome messages.

About two in the morning, the Zafiro arrived at Manila and anchored in the bay, and when it was light, about five o’clock, we came up on deck and looked round, but the land lies in a section of so vast a circle that one does not realise it is a bay at all. The morning was very dull and grey; hot, of course, but overcast, and the sea calm and grey like the sky. The city of Manila lay so nearly level with the water that it was almost out of sight, just a long low mass, rather darker than the sea. Far, far away inland a faint outline of mountains was perceptible, but Manila is built, for the most part, on a mud-flat at the mouth of a broad river called the Pasig. This is a curious river, only 14 miles long, coming from a big lake called the Laguna de Bayo, but yet it is wide and deep enough at the mouth for 5000-ton steamers to anchor at the wharves and turn in the stream.

About seven o’clock, or earlier, our friends’ launch came out for us, and in this little craft we steamed up the mouth of the Pasig, past rows and rows of steamers anchored at the quays, and hundreds of huge native barges covered over with round roofs of brown matting. I noticed numbers of brilliantly green cabbages floating down the stream, sitting on the water like lilies, with long brown roots trailing behind, and thought a cargo of vegetables had been wrecked, but was told these are water plants drifting down from inland bays up the river. They are the most extraordinary plants, of intensely crude and violent emerald, and make a marvellous dash of colour amongst the grey and brown shipping on the yellow, muddy water.

We landed at a big wharf, right in the town, and close to streets with shops, all looking strangely European after China and the Straits, the whole place reminding me more of the suburbs of Malaga or the port of Las Palmas than any other places I can think of. Here a carriage was waiting for us, and we drove all through the outskirts of the town, till we came out upon the bay again, and saw the open sea, where our friends’ house is situated in a quarter called Ermita. All Manila is divided into quarters, or wards, with curious Spanish or Filipino names—Malate, Pasay, Intramuros, Binondo, etc., and many names of Saints.

The days get very hot here after eight o’clock, whether the sun happens to be shining or not, so I did not go out until the cool of the evening, and spent the day in the house, unpacking and resting, and trying to forget the smell of those cattle. Never again, I am sure, shall I linger with pleasure near the door of a byre!

Everyone here goes about in diminutive victorias, very like the Italian carrozza, and all the horses are tiny ponies, the result of a cross between the little Chinese horse and a small Spanish breed. They are sturdy little beasts, and remarkably quick trotters, with thick necks, and look pretty if they are well kept; but some of those in the hired carriages are very poor little creatures, though they tear about with incredible loads of brown-faced natives.

We drove about the town, which all looks as if it had been put up in a hurry. There are no indications of antiquity outside Intramuros, the old Spanish Manila, founded in 1571, which stands, as its name signifies, within walls—crumbling grass-grown old walls, very high, and with a deep moat.

This Walled City, as the Americans called it, is the town the British took under General Draper in 1762, and these are the walls our ships bombarded at the same time, under Admiral Cornish, papa’s great-uncle. When we were at home, it seemed strange that just before I came to the Philippines, I should inherit the lovely old emerald ring which the priestly Governor of Manila gave to the Admiral, when the former was a prisoner of war in the British Fleet, during the few days we held the Philippines, before we gave them back to Spain. But when I was actually under the walls they fought for, I looked at the old ring, and the coincidence seemed stranger still. I wished it were a magic emerald that I could rub it lightly, and summon some mysterious spirit which would tell me all the old ring had seen and heard. But now, Old Manila is only a backwash leading to nowhere, for the modern town has spread itself all up the banks of the Pasig River.

Our way did not lie through the Walled City, but along outside it, down a broad avenue, bordered by handsome trees, over a bridge across the Pasig, and into the town of shops and streets. The whole place looked dull, grey, ugly, and depressing, and after Hong Kong it seemed positively squalid. Big houses like the magnificent stone palaces of Hong Kong, would be impossible here on account of the frequent earthquakes, but such buildings as there are look mean and dilapidated, and the streets are badly paved or not at all, weeds grow everywhere; in fact, there is a sort of hopeless untidiness about the place that is positively disheartening, like going into a dirty and untidy house. I think a great deal of the hopelessness, too, consists in the air of the natives, who appear small and indolent after one’s eye has become accustomed to the tall, fine figures of the busy Chinamen.

I was particularly struck with the fact that I saw no traces of anything one is accustomed to think of as Spanish—no bright mule-trappings, or women with mantillas, or anything gay and coloured, and the houses are not built round patios. I was told that the reason of this is that the Spaniards who settled in the Philippines all came from the north of Spain, from Biscaya, and of course the Spain one knows and thinks of as Spanish is Andalusia and the South, with the wonderful glamour and poetry of the Moorish influence.

In the course of our drive we went to a certain bridge to see a religious procession, and as we got near the place where it was to pass, the streets were crowded with people, and there were triumphal arches scattered about, all looking quite pretty in the rosy-pink glow of the sun, which was just beginning to set. We pulled up in a mass of carriages and traps on one side of the bridge, and waited an hour or more for the procession, which was then about three hours overdue.

While we waited there, we met and talked with a Mr —— whom I mentioned to you before as having come out from England in the same series of steamers as ourselves. He told us that he was putting up at the best hotel in Manila, which, he said, was haphazard and dirty beyond belief. We said we had had the same account from other people, and considered ourselves more than lucky to be staying with friends.

“Yes,” he said, “you are in luck, for you can’t imagine what a Manila hotel is like. And yet it is full of decent people. I wonder why they can’t run a better one.”

It does seem odd when one comes to think of it, because, though Manila is off the tourist track of the world, and there is no reason for any mere traveller to come here, still, people do come sometimes, and anyhow there are the Americans themselves, who want a shelter of some sort, and that nation has the reputation of being accomplished connoisseurs in the matter of hotels. One would imagine that a good hotel would be the first thing they would demand or establish, but they have been here six years now, and the Manila hotels are still a byword for unutterable filth and discomfort.

Well, about this procession, the occasion of which was the bringing down to Manila of a very sacred image, called the Virgin of Antipolo, from the town of Antipolo, which is inland, to deposit her in some church in Manila. She had been four hundred years in Antipolo, and was a very precious and much-battered relic, so her journey was a great event, and the procession had been travelling, by road and river, ever since before the dawn.

At last the long lines of people began to appear, crawling over the bridge in the last grey shadows. It proved to be a very dull affair, simply consisting of endless files of the faithful, carrying unlighted candles, with every now and then a band of music, and every now and then a group of paper lanterns carried on poles, or some gaudy banner, and all moving along to the accompaniment of a weird, unearthly chant. This kind of thing went on and on, and after an hour we got tired of it, and drove away without having seen the actual image, which was, we were told, a little, armless, wooden figure, dressed in a stiff tinsel robe, perched up on an immense high platform, decorated with lamps and flowers, and surrounded by priests chanting, and acolytes swinging censers.

We are to sail for Iloilo to-day, after lunch, having got a permit to go in the Kai-Fong, of the China Steam Navigation Company. We were to have come in this same steamer from Hong Kong, as I told you at the time, in which case we should have gone in her right through to Iloilo, touching here and at Cebú, but we received the telegram too late, an hour or so after she had left, and as we were told to start at once, we followed by that pleasing craft the Zafiro.

By this manœuvre we have clashed with a vexatious local law that forbids foreign (i.e., not American or Filipino) steamers to convey passengers from Island to Island of the Philippines, so we had to apply for this special permit, as they say the regular mail steamers, which ply between Manila and Iloilo, are exceedingly dirty and uncomfortable. They are owned by a Spanish Company, trading under the American flag. However, it is all settled now, in favour of the English boat, and we sail this afternoon.

I have only caught a passing glimpse of Manila, but I hope to be able to tell you more about it later on, as I have been invited to come back and pay a visit to our friends here in a month or two’s time.

LETTER II.
FROM MANILA TO ILOILO

S.S. “Kai-Fong,” China Sea, December 1, 1904.

I hear there will be a mail going out from Iloilo to-morrow, the day we arrive, so I will write you a letter to go by it, that you may not be disappointed—six weeks hence!

We left Manila at three o’clock on Monday, in lovely sunshine, and had a delightful voyage through scenery which was simply a miracle of beauty. The sky was intensely blue, with little white clouds; the sea calm and still more intensely blue, dotted with dreams of islands, some mauve and dim and far away, some nearer and more solid-looking, and a few quite close, so that we could see the great forests of bright green trees and the grassy lawns, which cover the hills and clothe the whole islands down to long, white, sandy beaches, with fringes of palm trees.

The islands are volcanic, mountainous, and of all shapes and sizes, from Luzon, which is nearly the size of England,[1] and Mindanao, which is larger still, down to tiny fantastic islets, but all rich, green, fertile—even a rock poking its head out of the brilliant sea, has its crown of green vegetation. I don’t know at what size an island ceases to be an island and becomes a mere rock, but anyhow, there are two thousand Philippines considered worth enumerating.

I noticed very few signs of cultivation, or even of human habitation, but was told that even if there were villages in sight, they would be difficult to distinguish, unless we passed close to them, as they are built of brown thatch, and placed amongst the trees. Here and there was a little group of white buildings, generally, in fact always, clustering round a huge church. We passed quite close to some of the islands, so that we saw the trees and beaches clearly, but even those at a distance were very distinct, and I was particularly struck with the absence of colour-perspective, for the islands some way off, if they were not so far away as to look mauve, were just as brilliantly green as those close at hand. One after another, like a ceaseless kaleidoscope, these fairy islands slipped past all day—in fact, as I write, I can hardly keep my attention on my letter, the scenery is so wonderful and so constantly varying.

We got to Cebú, which is the chief town of the island of that name, at six o’clock on Wednesday morning, and anchored just off the town, which appeared as a flat jumble of grey corrugated iron roofs and green trees, rather shut in by high mountains close behind. On account of these hills, they say Cebú is much hotter than Iloilo, as the latter town lies open to the Monsoons.

These are the chief towns of the Philippines: Manila, the capital, in Luzon; Iloilo, in Panay; and Cebú, in Cebú; and that is the order they come in as to size, though between the two provincial towns there is endless rivalry on the subject of importance. In fact they are a sort of local Liverpool and Manchester—bitterly jealous, and yet pretending to despise each other. There was a P. and O. cargo steamer anchored not far from us, the first ever seen at Cebú, and everyone seemed very proud of the event.

When we went on deck, we saw a couple of canoes, hollowed out of big tree trunks, circling round, and containing natives dressed in loin-cloths, offering to dive for coins, in the approved fashion, west of Port Saïd. They were fine young men, yellowy brown in colour, and they made a great deal of noise, but did not dive very well. After breakfast some of C——’s friends came off in a launch and took us ashore, when we drove in the usual little victoria, drawn by two small ponies, to the British Vice-Consulate, a large house on the borders of the town, where the Vice-Consul, Mr Fulcher, entertained us royally.

Here I followed the same programme as I did at Manila, resting in the cool house all the long, hot day, and driving out in the evening at about five o’clock, when the sun had begun to go down. We drove all through dim streets, with a gorgeous sunset fading in the sky, and I could not make things out very distinctly, but could see that we were passing along ramshackle, half-country roads with overshadowing trees, and every now and then we passed a row of little open shops with bright lights in them, and natives squatting about. There are no bazaars in this country, by-the-bye, only little mat-shed shops where food is sold.

That was all I saw of Cebú, as I did not go out this morning, and we sailed in the afternoon. When we came down to the wharf to get on board, the tide, or the Port Doctor, had allowed of the Kai-Fong, drawing up to the wharf, so we came on board up a plank, when one had to look at the ship instead of the water on each side! The ship was very busy getting a cargo of hemp into one of the holds, hemp being the peculiar produce of the Island of Cebú and the opposite ones of Samar and Leyte, all long-shaped islands lying almost parallel in the middle of the Archipelago.

Discharging Hemp from Paraos (Native Boats).

[To face page 10.]

The hemp comes on board in great oblong bales, looking like oakum, and a man told me it was the fibre of a plant like a banana tree, which the natives split and shred very skilfully, and then it is dried and done up in bales, and “that is all there is to it,” as the Americans say.

Opposite the town of Cebú is a long, low island called Mactan, where the great Portuguese Navigator Magellan was killed in the year 1521. The story is that the natives of the islands, finding Magellan invincible, and believing him to be enchanted, lured the great explorer away by treachery to the little island of Mactan, where they had prepared a pit covered with branches, such as they use to trap wild pigs. Magellan fell into this trap, whereupon the savages rushed out of their hiding-places and shot him in the joints of his harness with poisoned arrows, and one bold man finally finished him off with a spear. They poison their arrows to this day as they did then, by dipping the tip into a decomposed human body.

There is a monument to Magellan on the spot where he died, but we did not have time to go and see it, so I had to be content with looking at a photograph, which gave me a very good idea of the quaint old three-decker edifice of grey stone, tapering to a column at the top. The real and original spelling of Mactan is as I have written it, but it is now altered to Maktan, and for this change there is a very curious reason, dating from the days, some ten years ago, when the Filipinos, headed by a patriot of the name of Emilio Aguinaldo, revolted against the authority of Spain. The chief element in the uprising was a secret society, called the Katipunan, the device of which, on flags and so forth, was K K K, and to make this fact memorable, or to prove his power, Aguinaldo ordered the hard letter C to be replaced by K in all names in the Philippines, making Mactan, Maktan; Capiz, Kapiz; Catbologan, Katbologan, and so on. This alteration the Americans, some think unwisely, have not taken the trouble to abandon, so the revolutionary spelling remains a monument of the success of disloyalty, to say nothing of the names having thus lost all philological significance.

We are now passing round the north end of the Island of Cebú, for Panay lies to the westward, in a rough parallel. Sometimes the north passage is taken, and sometimes the south, according to the wind and current. The currents are very strong between these islands—all the Philippine Islands, I mean, and in many places the sea is always rough, in fact it is very seldom really calm anywhere, I believe.

Our fellow-passengers are all Americans, half of them military, officers and privates, who address each other in most unceremonious fashion, and the rest school-teachers. A most appropriate and characteristic company, as the American scheme out here is to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American methods; but at the same time they have ready plenty of soldiers to knock him on the head, if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before Americans think he is fit for it. A quaint scheme, and one full of the go-ahead originality of America.

I can understand the conduct of the free and easy soldiers, for such equality is not inconsistent with American social theories; but what puzzles me is the use of these astounding pedagogues, who are honest, earnest, well-meaning folk, but their manners are those of ordinary European peasants. And as to the language they speak and profess, it is so unlike English that literally I find it difficult to catch their meaning when one of them speaks to me direct, and quite impossible when they talk to each other. Yet I could forgive them their dreadful lingo, if only they would not use the same knife indiscriminately to lap up yolk of egg, or help themselves to butter or salt. Of course these good people are fresh from America, and utterly ignorant of all things and people outside their native State (such ludicrous questions they ask!), but quite apart from that, and the hopeless blunders they must make on that account, it seems a pity that such rough diamonds should represent to these natives the manners and intellect of a great and ruling white nation.

But here comes the most curious phenomenon of all, for I am told that the United States does not pose as either “white” or “ruling” in these islands, preferring, instead, to proclaim Equality, which seems a very strange way to treat Malays, and I find myself quite curious to see how the theory works out. I only hope it won’t mean that we shall have unmanageable servants and impudence to put up with. Our friends in Manila told me ominously that housekeeping was “difficult,” and I begin to wonder if Equality has anything to do with it!

They are a funny little people, these Filipinos, the women averaging well under 5 feet, with pretty, slender figures and small hands and feet. The original race was a little, fuzzy-headed, black people, remnants of which are still to be found in the mountains and in the smaller islands, but the Filipino, as one sees him, is the result of Malay invasions. Up in the north, in Luzon, the Malays are a race or tribe called Tagalo, but all this part of the Archipelago is called Visaya, and the people Visayans. Of these broad outlines there are many subdivisions of type of course, in the way that physique is different even in different counties in so small a space as England; but the average Filipino is the same everywhere. The Filipinos (by which are meant the Tagalos and Visayans) are, as nearly as one can say, a short, thick-set people, with yellowy-brown skins, round, flat faces, very thick lips, which frequently jut out beyond the tip of the nose, and more bridge to the same said nose in proportion to the amount of foreign blood in the owner’s veins. It is not easy to lay down any very definite rule about their appearance though, as the race is so hopelessly mixed with Spanish, Chinese, European—every nation under the sun, that it is difficult to say what is a Filipino face. One feature they have in common, and that is magnificent, straight, jet-black hair, which the women turn back from the forehead, where it makes a roll so thick that it looks as if it must be done over a pad, while they twist the back high up, in shiny coils. The men look as if their thick mops were cut round a basin, and they have no beards and moustaches—I mean they can’t grow any, not that they don’t want them! As far as I have seen, they appear to be very lazy, and to talk a great deal. They are not a bit like the Chinese or Japanese in any way, unless they happen to have a strain of that blood in them, and even then the resemblance is only physical, for though the type may be varied, the universal character remains unalterable.

I forgot to tell you that at Cebú we “collected” C——’s dog, a dear old brown person, with one of the sweetest faces I ever saw, who answers to the name of Tuyay, which is the Visayan for Victoria. I really must leave off writing now, as it is long past time to “turn in,” though I feel as if I could write on for hours, there is so much to tell you.

A Filipino Girl, aged 10.

A Casco (Barge).

[To face page 14.]

LETTER III.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ILOILO

Iloilo, December 4, 1904.

We arrived here on Friday last (the 2nd), and I at once sent off a letter to you, written on board the Kai-Fong, which letter ought to reach you some time in the middle of January.

We are so glad to be at the end of this long journey—exactly seven weeks from London—seven weeks to the very day, for we left London on a Friday and got here on a Friday; and all that time we have been travelling steadily, and have seen so much that it seems years already since we left home. I hope you got all the letters I wrote on the way? One each from Gibraltar, Marseilles, Port Saïd, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Penang, Hong Kong, Manila, and lastly, Cebú. I give you this list because I always have a fixed conviction that letters posted on a sea voyage seldom turn up, as the last one sees of them is going over the side in a strange land, in the clutches of some oily, dark person, who swears he will spend the money one has given him in stamps. I try to believe him, but he, like Victor Hugo’s beggar, thinks he has to live somehow, I suppose.

Well, so here we are at last on our “Desert Island,” as you call it—which is really a vast and fertile country, with several big towns, of which this is the chief and largest.

We got in at dawn as usual, the run from Cebú (which I notice the Americans call See-boo) being about twelve hours, so our first view of the Island of Panay and the town of Iloilo was in the early morning light, from the deck of the steamer, which lay, waiting for pratique, in the “roads,” at the mouth of a river. We saw a long, flat, dark-green coast line, with a high range of purple mountains far inland, and the town of Iloilo, like Manila, almost imperceptible, as it lies so low on the mud-flats of a big estuary. It did not look at all inviting, just a line of very green trees, with some grey iron roofs amongst them, and it seemed as if it must be baking hot, but, as a matter of fact, the very flatness and the direction of the mountains keep the place cool, for, as I told you before, it lies exposed to the N.-E. and S.-W. Monsoons, the great arbiters of fate in the China seas.

On the map you may find marked a small island called Guimaras, which is about 4 or 5 miles off, but in this air it looks so close that trees and houses can be seen over there with the naked eye, and yesterday evening, in driving down a street of Iloilo and seeing Guimaras at the end, I thought it was part of this island at the end of the road!

Guimaras is very small, with low, pointed hills, covered with forests, as are all these islands; and behind it, 7 miles further away, lies the big island of Negros, the mountains of which loom up, a dim, pale purple outline behind bright green Guimaras, making one more of these marvellous colour effects. One of the high peaks we see is a volcano called Malaspina or Canloon, which is 4592 feet high, and only half quiescent. At any rate, if we cannot actually see it, there is such a volcano in Negros. There are plenty of volcanoes in the Philippines, twenty-three of them all told, and that fact and the frequent earthquakes give an uncomfortable impression, as of a thin crust of rocks and trees over vast subterranean fires.

Here, in Panay, the mountains are 20 miles inland, away to the west—a long range of peaks and serrated ridges, behind which the sun sets with magnificent effects. From the foot of the mountains the land stretches away quite flat, watered by big rivers, and where one of these streams forms a wide estuary, this town is built, as I told you, on the mud, in the same way that Manila stands on the mud-flats of the Pasig.

The first settlement of white men in Panay was only a Spanish garrison, inside a fort built in the days when a few Spaniards in armour lurked under shelter from the poisoned arrows of the savage natives, while now and then a priest ventured out to see what a little talk and baptism would do towards making life more pleasant for everyone concerned.

When the island became more civilised, or settled, or subdued, or all three, a town called Jaro (pronounced Hahro) was founded about 3 miles up the river, and became the capital of Panay, but now the tide of commerce has swept down-river, and the chief town is Iloilo, all crammed down at the edge of the sea, with many of its suburbs nothing more nor less than sandy beach. It is a big town, with long, straggling streets, and the houses, all two stories high, with grey corrugated iron roofs, stand apart, separated by little bits of garden with palms and flowering trees, which makes it quite pretty, in spite of all the buildings being totally devoid of any architectural beauty whatsoever.

At present the N.-E. Monsoon is blowing, and everyone is anxious to point out to me how deliciously cool the weather is, and it is certainly not so overpowering as I had expected, but all the same I find it quite hot enough to be pleasant and a little over. Though there is no dew, the nights are refreshing—almost cold by contrast with the day, and the evenings charming, while the early mornings are simply delicious. Dawn begins at half-past five, and by six the sun is up, but the air is exquisite till about half-past eight, when it begins to get too hot for anything but shade and fans, if one has any choice. I think the average Fahrenheit now is 83°, but as life here is adapted to such temperature, you must not think that means anything like what 83° would be in England. Still, when all is said and done, it is very hot, and if this is what they call “winter,” I am only thankful that I have not plunged at once into “summer.” This “winter” goes on till March, and then the weather begins to get hotter and hotter till June, when the Monsoon shifts to the S.-W., and the rainy season begins.

Four months dry and cool; four months dry and hot; four months wet and hot—that is the climate over most of the Philippine Islands, but it varies in sequence in different places—areas is a better word—and on the Pacific seaboard the seasons are quite reversed, so that it is rainy there when it is dry here. By rain and dry, however, I gather that a great deal of drought or a long, steady rain is not meant, for all during the dry season there are heavy showers, and everything remains green, while in the wet season there are spells of fine weather. Now I think I have described to you all I can of Iloilo till I see more of the place, but I know how anxious you will be to have some idea of what it is like.

We are busy house-hunting, which is a tedious and toilsome business, as there is not such an institution as a house agency—you allow a rumour to get about that you want a house, and then people tell other people to tell you where an empty building, such as you say you want, is to be found. Then you go off and “find” the house—a matter, usually, of infinite difficulties and sometimes quite impossible, as the Filipino cab-drivers don’t know the names of the streets, or the numbers, or the names of the people. The best plan is, get into a rickety old trap and let the man drive about, while you lean out and ask for the house you started out to find, and end by seeing another one with se aquila (to let) written up, and stopping as near to it as the driver can pull up his pony, and getting out there instead.

Having thus “found” a house, you set to work to “find” the owner of it, who is probably at the club, or a cock-fight, or playing cards; and when he, or she, appears, you ask—and this is quite necessary—if the house is to let; for the board does not signify much, as they seldom take the trouble to remove one when once it has been put up. Most of the boards are obligingly going through the process of removing themselves, one nail at a time.

When the house really is to let, you ask the rent, and whatever the answer is you throw up your hands in horror, and declare it is muy caro (very dear), and that you will give half, calling assorted Saints to testify to all the drawbacks which make the house unfit for human habitation at any price.

Then a long argument ensues, for the people never really want to lose a tenant, as they know there is no lack of choice, for trade is very bad, and so many houses stand empty. All the same, the rates and taxes are appallingly high, and the rents are preposterous for this sort of town, and for the accommodation offered. Moreover you have a strangely lazy, supercilious, half-bred sort of people to deal with, who would rather keep a house empty and say they must have 100 dollars a month and starve, than take 50 for it and live on the fat of their land.

The money here is a dollar currency called Conant, which is worth 2s. 1d.—half the American dollar. This is the Philippine currency, and is named after its inventor, an American called Conant, and I wish he had invented a cheaper unit, for 10 Conant dollars, or pesos, as they are called, are nothing to spend, whereas the equivalent, an English guinea, is an important sum, and represents four times the spending value of 10 pesos. It is a silver currency, dollars and notes, and the coins have rather a pretty design of a man sitting looking at the sea, surrounded by most amusing inscriptions. For instance, the 5-cent, piece is: “Five Centavos,” and underneath is “Filipinas.” Why not “Five cents.” and “Philippines,” or else “Cinco centavos, Filipinas?” Why such mongrel? One can only suppose it is the notion of Equality coming out in some mysterious way by meeting the natives half-way in Spanish, which, by-the-bye, is not their native language, and only a few of them speak it at all.

The houses here, as I said before, are all two-storied, the upper part of wood, and the lower of stone or concrete. The floors are of long planks of hard, dark, native woods, which the servants polish with petroleum pads on their feet, sliding about till the surface is like brown glass. The walls are merely wooden partitions, painted white or green, and in the corners of the rooms appear the big tree trunks to which the house is lashed, sometimes just painted white like the walls, or encased in a wooden cover. The word “lashed,” I must tell you, is not a figure of speech, as the houses really are tied together with bejuco, rattan (a strong, fibrous vine), so as to allow sufficient play for earthquakes, which, it appears, are so frequent in these islands as to be in no way remarkable.

Old Spanish Houses at Molo

[To face page 20.]

The “windows” are really the greater part of each side of the house left open and fitted with shutters, sliding in grooves. Even with these “windows” closed against rain or sun the rooms remain cool, as the shutters are composed of wooden slats a little apart. Inside these is another set for very rainy weather, made of small square panes, each filled with a very thin, white, pearl oyster shell.

Taken all round, the Philippine houses are very pretty, and capable of a great deal of decoration, though, of course, one does not want any draperies or many ornaments about in such a climate, where such superfluities would simply become the homes and nurseries of clouds of mosquitoes and other small fry, besides being unendurably hot even to look at.

At first it appears very odd to see houses without chimneys and rooms without fireplaces, though I can’t think why they have none, as it must be very difficult to keep the houses dry in the wet Monsoon.

LETTER IV.
A PHILIPPINE HOUSE—AMERICAN PRICES—NATIVE SERVANTS—FURNITURE

Iloilo, December 10, 1904.

I am sure you will be pleased to hear that we have already found a house to suit us, in fact we are quite charmed with it, and can’t be too thankful that we did not hastily take any of the others we saw. C—— went to look at some on Tuesday, but on the way he saw this one, and liked it so much that he at once came back for me to look at it, and I went off to inspect, even in the middle of the day! I agreed with him in thinking the house charming, so we took it at once—or as soon as we had finished the preliminary pantomime with the Filipino landlady, a pleasant woman, married to a Spaniard.

The house is in one of the two nicest streets, a little out off the town, on the spit of land formed by the estuary and the open sea. These two streets run parallel, but as the spit gets narrower they leave off, and end in the Government Hospital, the Cavalry Corral (stables), some Government buildings, and diminish gradually to a long road, a house, some barren land, a few palms, a pilot’s hut, a little bit of beach, some pebbles, and one small crab.

Our house faces S.-W. on a garden, and the back is all open to the river and the N.-E. Monsoon—the most important consideration here, for houses that do not get the wind are stifling and unhealthy. We saw two or three that would have suited us very well, but for the fact that they stood the wrong way, or because the through draught was impeded by some tree or building outside.

The house we have taken is in the usual style, such as I described to you in my last letter, and in one-half of the lower part lives our Spanish landlord, while in the other half, rather vault-like, se aquila. The lower parts of the houses are unhealthy, because of the malarial gases arising from the soil, and the damp, so no one lives in the basements if they can afford anything else.

The upper part of this house we are going to live in is quite a separate dwelling, as it is approached by an outside staircase, coming up upon an open balcony running round three sides of the upper story. The balcony is a great charm, and very few of the houses have this addition. I thought that the Spaniards would have made open balconies the fashion out here, but was very much surprised to see none, and can only attribute the lack of them to the fact that the settlers came from the North, in the same way that the houses have no patios, and so forth. A roofed balcony like this is not only a delightful lounge, but it keeps the house very cool, besides catching a lot of the heavy rains, and it seems incomprehensible that any sane person could build a house in this climate without one. Verandahs are, of course, quite unknown, but I daresay there is a reason for all this in the terrible Typhoons which sweep over these islands, and would make short shrift of any fancy out-works.

We come into a big hall at the back of the house, with the outer side almost all (with shutters) open to the estuary, and the front portion of the house is the sala. Off these two, open five rooms, all large and airy, and freshly painted white. In many of the houses the top of each room has a deep frieze in the shape of a pretty wooden grill, a Chinese fashion, which allows the air to circulate freely through the house—to say nothing of the remarks of the dwellers! We have not got this extra luxury, which I suppose has not been considered necessary in so airy a house.

At the back is what is called the Azotea, which in this case happens to be built over the house below. It is a big, sloping, concrete floor, on which are built the kitchen, bathroom, store-room, etc.—all very compact, and quite away from the house, and not coming between us and the wind. In this, again, some of the houses we saw were impossible, for the outbuildings on the Azotea were placed so that they stopped the draught through the house. You may think I am a little foolish on the subject of a current of air, but I assure you I am not, for in a position with no draught the pores of the skin open like so many sluices, and one’s head begins to throb.

So that is our house, which, after genuine Spanish haggling, we got for 50 pesos a month, a sum working out at about £60 a year, a very low rent indeed out here. In fact, when we set out and said we meant to give no more than 50 dollars a month for a house, we were simply laughed at, and at first were almost inclined to think it could not be done, but when we saw the numbers of houses standing empty in all the nice streets, we stuck to our sum, and are very glad now that we did so. A Spaniard or Mestizo (Eurasian) would not dream of giving more than thirty for a house like the one we have taken, but an American would give a hundred. That is where the trouble comes in—in making the people understand that we don’t mean to grind them down, nor, on the other hand, to pay foolish sums, but to give the right value for what we get.

The Back of our House.

Showing Azotea and Outbuildings.

[To face page 24.]

You know the way Americans go about in Europe spending the unit, which is lower than their own, like water, with no sense of value? And how they raise prices wherever they go! Well, they have done the same thing here, and an American woman, who was talking to me the other day, told me it was now beginning to be apparent to them what a mistake they had made, and they bitterly regretted having made the Philippines as expensive as America, but that it was very difficult for them to go back now to the more reasonable scale, for as soon as a Filipino found out you were an American, nothing would move him from American prices. Poor thing, she was very bitter about it, and I felt very sorry for her (as well as rather alarmed for myself), for the sums she was paying in rent and wages to live at all in Iloilo, would have kept her in comfort in London or Paris.

Well, when we had settled on the house, we drove straight to the shop-streets of the town—or rather, street, for there is only one with shops, the principal thoroughfare, called the Calle Real. Some of the shops have quite big, handsome windows of plate glass, with wonderful things displayed in them, but when you get inside you find they are, like the shop window in Browning’s poem, only “astonishing the street,” and beyond the window there is nothing but a large half-empty hall, where a few languid, sallow Eurasians stand trimming their nails behind long, untidy counters. These are the Spanish, Filipino, and German shops; but the Chinese are just the reverse, with no show in the little low window, and the inside a small, poky room, crammed with everything any human being ever invented, and kept by energetic, slant-eyed men who simply won’t let you go without buying something.

The principal shop, however, is the great Store, which is kept by an English firm called Hoskyn & Co., and is said to be the best in the islands, and there we bought elemental necessaries, in the way of a few pieces of furniture, some groceries, china, glass, and so forth, at prices, when translated into shillings, to turn one faint with dismay. It was maddening to think of the lovely things we could have got for the same money at home, nevertheless these were very cheap for the Philippines, for this is a notoriously cheap “store,” which can afford to sell at low prices, as they have such an immense business, even being able to compete with the shops in Manila, where they send all manner of life’s necessaries. Though I am once more reminded of papa’s remark that he never realises what a curse human life has become till he reads through a store list.

When we had done our shopping, we came back to the house and unpacked our new household goods as they came in, hung lamps, and so on, and all that day worked hard at the house. At intervals prospective servants kept dropping in, for servants are secured here in much the same way as houses—people tell other people about the opportunity, and the news flies about in servant-land.

All shapes and sizes of Filipinos loomed on the balcony at intervals, and drifted into the hall and stood watching us till we had time to attend to them. In this country all the doors stand always open for coolness, and there are no bells, and when you go to a house you walk in at the door and sing out for a servant. Some people go so far as to have a hand bell at the top of the stairs, but the whole system seems to me ridiculous, so I have persuaded C—— to invest in a door bell, which he is going to fix to the main door into the hall.

We were unpacking and going about the house, and every now and then we would come upon a silent figure waiting, just waiting, anywhere, leaning up against something, and perfectly indifferent to time or place. This stamped him as a candidate. To each one C—— put first of all the question:

“Can you speak English?”

And when the man said “Yeees, sair,” he was refused without any further parley, for nothing will induce us to take servants who can understand what we are saying, which would make life impossible in these open houses. Besides that, when they speak English it means they have been with Americans, who spoil the Filipino servants dreadfully with their well-meant notions of equality, and give ridiculous wages as well. In the Spanish days a Filipino head-servant got 5 or 6 pesos a month, and the peso then was the Mexican dollar, which is only about two-thirds of the Conant unit. It was, and is, riches to them, but so changed are these things now, that we are considered wonderful because we have found a mayordomo or head boy willing to come to us for 10 pesos a month and a second boy for 6. An American would give them twice as much, if not more, which would simply turn them into drunkards, or gamblers, or both, or worse.

All the Philippine servants are men, as all over the East, though some women do have a native maid; but as all the women I have met do nothing but complain of the laziness and uselessness of these handmaidens, I have no idea of saddling myself with such a burden.

The two men we have engaged are about twenty years of age, but it is always very difficult to tell how old Filipinos are, as they look old when they are young and young when they are old. They can give no particular account of themselves, these two, and have unaccountably mislaid their little books of references; but we are taking them on the recommendation of their faces, which are nice, and that is just as good a standard to go by in a Filipino as in anyone else! One is a native of Guimaras; the other a Tagalo, from Luzon; and both are short, thick-set, sturdy-looking fellows who ought not to give us much trouble with falling ill. Half the time here the servants are ill with fever, or colds, or heaven knows what, for it is a race without much stamina.

One of the most aggravating characteristics of the Filipinos is the way they murmur, for they have naturally very soft voices, which become positively a whisper with shyness and awe. The English people here adopt the custom, which prevails throughout the East, of calling their servants “boys,” but the Americans use the Spanish word muchacho, and that is unfortunate, as they give all vowels the narrow, English value, making it this word muchaycho. It sounds so odd, this lack of ear, and quite alters some of the Spanish names—such as saying Cavyt for Cavite (the naval port of Manila), Caypiz for Capiz (a town in Panay), and so on, and though they pronounce Jaro exactly the same as the English town of Harrow, thank goodness they don’t go so far as to call this place Eye-low-Eye-low!

Filipino Servants.

[To face page 28.]

But I am wandering away from the servants, and I have not yet introduced the cook to you. We had less trouble to get this treasure than the others, as all the natives cook well by instinct—at least, they know how to make the best of what food there is to be had, which is all one wants. This particular chef is a shrivelled, pock-marked person, about 4 feet 6 in height, with an array of immense teeth, and an air of intense importance; this last characteristic being funny or annoying according to the mood one happens to be in oneself. His wages are 15 pesos a month, and as he is a married man, or says so, he is to live with his family in the town.

And that was the end of the first day, and a very long and fatiguing one in this climate.

When we came back next morning we found that the boys, who had been left in charge of the house and what furniture we had fixed up, had already swept and polished the floors, which made an immense difference to the appearance of the place, and the lamps were filled and trimmed. There is electric light in the town, but it is so very bad, and is the cause of so much complaint, that all have to supplement their expensive electricity with oil lamps before they can read. We are, therefore, not going to have it put on, though it would be quite easy, as the wire passes over us from next door. The efficiency and intelligence of the new servants pleased us very much, but all the same we observed cautiously to each other: “New brooms sweep clean.”

We left the new brooms still sweeping, and went off to the shops again, and once more spent important and heart-breaking sums on the bare necessities of life. This time it was furniture, at the shop of a Chinese Eurasian, where we got a lot of things that look very nice, though they are not anything wonderful in the way of wood; but in these light, open houses with no fires and no carpets, it is not necessary to have such rich-looking furniture as at home. If one likes to spend still more money, there are beautiful things to be had made from magnificent hard Philippine woods, but the high price of labour, the poverty everywhere, and lack of capital and enterprise, have made these hard-wood things so dear that they are luxuries. The ordinary furniture is, in spite of the cent.-per-cent. import duties, either made out of Oregon pine, or else imported ready made from Vienna; but an insect called buc-buc, with which the country abounds, eats these soft pine woods, though it will not touch the native mahogany, teak, ebony, etc. It is not as if this Philippine timber were swept off for export, for no trade is done with it as no cheap labour is to be had, and splendid trees just decay in the crowded forests on the hills.

For our sala we invested in basket furniture, a necessity in this heat, for padded chairs or cushions would be unendurable. The bamboo and rattan, of which Chinamen would make all sorts of pretty chairs and couches for a few pesos a piece, grow plentifully here, but in the Philippines such articles are only to be had at three times the price, as they are imported from China, for the Filipinos are too lazy and stupid to make anything of the materials given them by “el buen Dios,” and if they did, the scale of wages, set by the American Government, would make the things even more expensive than those imported. So the reeds rot, and the woods rot; and we, for our part, cannot cease to regret that we did not, while we were in Hong Kong, invest in some of the cheap and beautiful furniture we saw there, but we took local advice and forbore to import anything into this land of prohibitive tariffs; though now we discover that, tariffs and all, we should have found it cheaper to have brought the things with us.

All this expense of life springs from the accepted interpretation of the maxim, “Philippines for the Filipinos,” which saying was invented by the late (and first) Governor-General of the Philippines, a man of the name of Taft, who is now Secretary of War in the United States. I suppose the idea caught on in America, and the good people there, whose opinion controls affairs in this country, which they have never seen, think that prohibitive tariffs and the exclusion of cheap Chinese or Japanese labour, must be a good thing for these depopulated islands if it is a benefit to the overcrowded U.S.A.

As a matter of fact, when applied to an indolent, indifferent race, the result is stagnation and starvation prices, which is a terrible state of affairs in a hot country like this, where food and labour ought to be plentiful and cheap, or nothing will pay. I can’t think that the Americans really believe the Filipinos to be as high a development of the human race as they are themselves; but since they wish, with the best intentions, to allow the Filipinos to benefit by American systems of government, these Malays must first learn the A B C of such a system. Whether they are capable of profiting by such lessons, or whether they are so foreign to the essence of this race as to ruin it, remains to be demonstrated.

Well, I must get back to the house again, and the end of the story is that we moved into our house on Thursday, the 8th, and slept here that night. We were able to do this so soon, as people have been very kind in lending us things—sheets and towels from one, table-linen from another, and so on—but all the same I wish our cases would come, as there is such a responsibility about other people’s gear.

À propos of these same cases, we are rather uneasy in our minds about them, as we are beginning to hear alarming rumours of Customs duties to be paid. Wedding presents used to be exempt, but quite lately duties were levied on them, and I am afraid we shall have to pay for our own things, which is a bore, not to say rather a blow.

We got through all our trunks, etc., that we had with us with a perfunctory opening of one box, a few questions, and the signing of papers, the only trouble being C——’s gun, which they took away, and he will not be able to get a licence, or allowed to have it out of the Customs House before he finds two “bonds” of 100 dollars each. That is, in clear English, he must find two people who are prepared to bet the American Government 100 dollars each that he is not going to sell the gun to an Insurgent.

So, barring the gun anxiety, we got our boxes in all right, and are told it would have gone equally well with the cases had we had them with us, but as they are coming out by freight, they will be subject to the duties. However, the authorities tell us it will not be very severe—C—— went and inquired about it, as he said he would rather not take our spoons and forks and things out of bond, but would prefer to send them back to Hong Kong rather than pay a large sum. So, all things considered, C—— is not reassured, so he has arranged to have the cases sent here unopened and in bond; and is going to open them, in bond, at the Custom House, and have the contents appraised before he decides what to do with them. The only reasonable hope is that many of the contents, such as plate, may be exempt, or very lightly taxed, as they are articles that could not possibly be produced in the Philippines; but when I mentioned this to a Customs official, he replied that such an idea had nothing to do with the system of taxation.

This is a fearfully long letter, but even now I feel I have not told you half I wanted to.

LETTER V.
HOUSEKEEPING IN ILOILO

Iloilo, December 17, 1904.

We are settling down very comfortably into our charming house, which we like more and more, and are continually congratulating ourselves on our luck in having found such a nice home.

There is nothing special to tell you about since I last wrote, so I will try to give you some idea of my housekeeping, of which I think I have not yet told you anything beyond just mentioning how many servants we have.

I find that the cook—he with the important manner and the big teeth—has been an under-cook in an American hotel, or what he is pleased to call an American hotel, by which I take it he means one of the saloons or eating-houses in the town. So far, however, he has proved himself a very good cook indeed, which is even more necessary here than anywhere else, for food in the Philippines has but little variety, and is not nourishing at its best. Every morning I give this person a peso and a half, with which he goes off to the market and buys whatever takes his fancy, or, more probably, what is to be had, which generally takes the form of an incredibly small and thin fowl—alive; one or two little fish; some green peppers or egg-plants, and always a few very small, half-ripe tomatoes. With these and with help from the store-room, he concocts a very good lunch and dinner, and, doubtless, makes a good thing out of it, but most cooks charge 2 dollars for the same menu, and he really provides for us very well. I supply tea, salt, butter, lard, tinned fruits, potatoes, macaroni—in fact all the dry provisions usually kept in a store-room, I don’t know what is the technical name for them.

The store-room (dispensa, they call it), where these treasures are hoarded up, is a very nice little dark cabin, with shelves all round, which I made the boys clean out and wipe everywhere with petroleum, an excellent precaution against the numberless and extraordinary animals with which one has to share the house. I got tall glass jars for protection against cockroaches, and tins to keep mice off, and wire-netting for rats, and naphthaline to astonish the scorpions and spiders; and last, but by no means least, a good strong padlock for human beings! When the tins and bottles were all arranged, they looked very home-like.

We get up at half-past five or six, and I give one of the boys 20[2] cents, with which he goes out and buys bread for the day at the shop of some Chinaman down the street. It is necessary to get small daily supplies of everything, for food will not keep. Some people have told me fearful anecdotes about the horrors perpetrated by the Chinamen in the making of their bread, and these faddists have theirs made at home, but the Chinese bread tastes quite good, and is much more light and digestible than that made by the house-cooks. As our cook has cooked for Americans, he knows how to make the hot cakes which are the great feature of American breakfasts, but we won’t have them, for they are deadly anywhere, especially in the tropics.

After our seven o’clock breakfast, which consists very largely of eggs, and after C—— has gone to the office, I open the door of the dispensa and serve out the day’s supplies; but this routine was not brought about without a struggle, for at first the cook persisted in coming to me intermittently all day long to ask for things. At least, he invented wants, but I had an idea his only object was the key of the dispensa, as these Filipinos have a full measure of the cunning of the brown-faced person all the world over. However, I disappointed him about that, always leaving whatever I was doing to go and open the door and get out what he wanted, at the same time remarking, as best I could, that if he did not ask for things at the proper time he must do without them. Then once or twice I carried the threat into effect, and when he heard what C—— had to say about the dinner, that cured him. Everyone tells me doleful tales about the way the muchacho or boy robs them, so I thought it would be better to start from the first by giving as few opportunities as possible for trouble of this sort.

In the morning the servants’ food is also given out, each one getting an allowance of rice (for which purpose we lay in a large sackful), and this they boil and eat with some tiny fish which they buy for themselves with a few extra cents I give them. I believe it is unheard-of extravagance to give the extra money; and I never measure out the rice, but let them take it, for, after all, it is all the poor souls live on. All over the Philippines the natives of all classes live almost entirely on rice, which formerly used to be grown in all the islands, but rinderpest destroyed many of the carabaos (buffaloes), which worked the soil, and high wages and heavy taxes have wrought even greater havoc, so that now the supply nearly all comes from China. You see, high wages are offered in the towns, and what with that and the unsuitable education they receive, the country-people all flock into the towns, and the country places are empty. It is on the coast, in the towns, that rice is so much eaten, for inland the staple food is camote (sweet potato); so the country-people think rice a luxury, and the town’s-people eat camote as a treat.

When I wrote last, I don’t think the staff was completed by the washerwoman, was it? A person with a huge, almost black, pan face came and stood in the picture of blue sky and green palm-branches framed in the doorway, dressed in a skirt formed of a tight fold of red cloth and a muslin bodice with huge sleeves (the native costume), holding a big black umbrella in one hand, and muttering in an undertone, while she kept one dull, rolling eye on Tuyay, who was disposed to growl and sniff.

We were at breakfast at the time, and as we ate we conversed patiently with her till we found that this person wanted to be taken on as a lavandera at 20 pesos a month, which is about twenty-six guineas a year. This offer we refused with imprecations, and we added that we would not give more than 10.

She melted away, murmuring, from the front door, and presently reappeared at the back door (both opening upon the hall, but at different ends), and murmured afresh. I must tell you, by-the-bye, that, following a very general custom here, we use one end of the hall as dining-room, though there is a room which has been used for that purpose, but it looks on the alley between this house and the next, and is not so cool as the hall.

After more conversation, we decided to engage this pan-faced individual at 12 pesos a month as a stop-gap, till we should be able to find some more intelligent woman, and there and then I gave her a bagful of soiled linen, and off she went.

Next day at lunch she suddenly reappeared, perfectly cow-like and stolid, leaning up against the door-post and murmuring so that C—— simply got wild with her, and would have thrown everything on the table at her head, I believe, if I had not been there.

As the cook is the only one of the servants who speaks above a whisper, he was sent for, and he told us that pan-face wanted soap, starch, and charcoal. All the washing is done in cold water at some well, it appears, and they only want a little charcoal to put in the iron. So C—— wrote an order, a vale they call it, upon Hoskyn’s for soap, a box-iron, starch, and charcoal, and away went the new lavandera.

But we had not seen the last of her, for the next day she came again, at breakfast this time, and murmured again, clutching the bulgy gamp and leaning against the door-post. This time the cook told us she wanted tin tubs, and C—— gave a sort of roar as he asked her when the devil she was going to begin the washing, but she only looked more hopelessly stupid, and her face became more like a gorilla’s. At last she got her vale for tubs, and off she went—but about mid-day she reappeared, on the balcony, outside the front door, with the tubs, huge tin baths, sitting beside her.

C—— managed to control himself sufficiently to ask her if there was anything the matter with the tubs, and she was understood to say no, but she only wanted to show us she had got tubs; and she melted away.

Next afternoon I was told the lavandera had arrived, so I went out to tell her the señor would soon be in and ready to listen to her, though I really had some doubt about the latter statement, but I found her undoing a huge bundle of washing—all finished and ready! And such beautiful work, C——’s white linen suits done to perfection, my frocks and blouses like new—I never saw clothes look more fresh and lovely. It was a pleasant surprise.

So pan-face remains, but all the same we are quite prepared to find this standard not kept up for long, and if any remonstrance has to be made, we know we shall have that blank look and that murmuring to face again.

The boys are shaping very well, and if they go on as they are doing, no one could wish for better servants. I did not bewilder them more than I could help at first, but sprang a routine on them by degrees in a mixture of pantomime, Italian and a word or two of Spanish, that seems to answer the purpose very well. Two things C—— insisted on from the first: one, that the servants should wear native costume and bare feet in the house; and the other, that they must address us as señor and señora, none of which little marks of etiquette are insisted on in American households, but we think, and I believe rightly, that they are of the greatest importance in dealing with Orientals. C—— said if they didn’t like these rules they could go, but apparently they did like them, and they have stayed.

We asked some friends to dinner a few nights ago, and just before they arrived C—— went into the hall and found an unknown young man, in a very smart, white, buttoned-up, linen European suit with starched collar, and white canvas shoes, standing on a chair in the middle of the hall, doing something to one of the lamps. When the man turned round, we saw, to our amazement, that he was Domingo—our second boy!

When he saw C——’s expression, the servant was quite frightened, not having any idea what crime he could be committing or have committed, but he very soon understood that if he did not take off those shoes and that coat he would be fired out of the house. I don’t think the poor creature meant any harm, in fact he was supposed to be got up in his best to do honour to our guests, but he fled at once to the Azotea, and has never been seen again except in the Filipino dress, which is a loose shirt rather like a Chinaman’s coat, only fastening up the middle, and with bare feet.

Yesterday the cook appeared, carrying four huge, tall orchid plants, with very green leaves and pale mauve flowers, such lovely things, which he suggested would look well in the sala, and I quite agreed, so we began to negotiate for them. The countryman who had brought the flowers was ushered to the back door, and there was understood to murmur that he wanted 2 pesos (four shillings) for the four plants, but the cook, who said this was muy caro, got him down to a peso and 20 cents; only, the people here use many terms applicable to the old coinage, such as real, peseta, and so on, which make it so extremely puzzling to discover what the price of things really is, that I found it difficult to make out what to give; but the cook fished out a peso and 20 cents out of a pile of money I put on the table, and the man picked the two coins up and went off quite content. In my ignorance, I thought it rather a shame to insist on so low a price for such lovely plants—and orchids, too! However, I have since found out that these plants grow wild in great profusion in the woods over in the Island of Guimaras, and that what I had paid was like giving a man at home two shillings for a bunch of primroses. In spite of this, I decline to consider myself swindled, or to be dissatisfied with my bargain.

When the orchids had been bought, I asked the cook where he proposed to find pots to put them in, and he smiled in a very superior fashion, and said they only wanted some earth and a piece of sacking to live in, and they could be kept alive by certain airings and drinks of water; and when I said, “Who is going to do all this?”

“Domingo, señora,” he said in a great hurry. “Domingo is the only one who really understands plants”—and he grinned and nodded his head with marvellous rapidity.

I rather fancied the placid Domingo would be told he knew about plants and have to attend to them, after the fashion of one or two other “jobs” I had noticed, but I thought it best not to interfere, as Domingo is twice the size of the cook, and ought to be able to look after himself. Later on I saw the two of them fixing the tall plants, with roots neatly tied up in sacking bags, to the walls of the sala, or rather, Domingo very adroitly tying and nailing up, while the cook stood by to talk twenty to the dozen, and came afterwards to me for approval.

We had a very amusing scene of this description at the very beginning, when we fixed up the mosquito nets, on which occasion all hands, myself included (with needle and cotton) did something tangible, while the cook devoted the time to talking and jabbering and hopping about, uncannily like a monkey.

The orchids are really lovely, and make the sala look charming with their masses of little blooms of mauve and yellow against the white walls, and in time I must try to get some small trees in tall Chinese stands of blue and green earthenware, which adorn the houses here in profusion, and suit the white paint and brown floors admirably.

LETTER VI.
A WASTED LAND

Iloilo, Christmas Eve, 1904.

We have just come back from a delightful drive, to a town called Molo, which lies inland, in the direction of the river, but on the opposite bank to Jaro, the latter, as I think I told you, having been the capital of the Island of Panay in the olden days. There is a good road out to both of these towns, which crosses the river at Molo, and makes a circle, passing through a village called Mindoriao, and this is the great drive of the place, in fact the only one. The whole round is about 8 or 9 miles, however, which is too long for a paseo (promenade), so the carriages roll out at sunset to one of the two towns, turn round the quaint, ramshackle, old plazas, and return whence they came, spinning along in the fresh night air, with lamps lighted, and all the little ponies gallantly determined to pass each other.

Along the sides of the road, for a long way out of the town, stretches a vast suburb of picturesque native huts of palm thatch, built on high poles in the jungle, or standing in the edge of the river, surrounded by palms and all sorts of tropical trees of different brilliant greens, through which may be caught glimpses of intensely blue river or sea and exquisite mauve mountain ranges.

We enjoyed our drive immensely, and kept wishing that Papa could see the endless pictures of brown and yellow huts, women in bright red dresses, the groups of children and animals, the grey old Spanish churches and belfries—I think if you ever came out here he would spend his whole time on a camp stool, sketching for dear life!

Our cases have come from home at last, though I don’t know why I should say that, as they have not been so very long after us, but we were rather grubbing along till they came, which made the time seem longer. When C—— was informed they had arrived, he went down to the Custom House and spent a long day with the official appraiser, a most polite and patient young man, weighing and examining everything. The methods of doing this are wonderful and alarming, for they weigh the silver and plate with their leather or wooden cases, and the duty is charged by so much on the kilo! Imagine what the proportion is on a dozen silver spoons or knives in a handsome oak case! All the italics and exclamations in the biggest printing house in the world could not convey my sentiments upon this subject. The textiles are examined with a magnifying glass, appraised as materials, and taxed as such, at the rate of 50 per cent., upon what the Customs people choose to say was their original value. If the material is made up, there is extra duty of 100 per cent., which makes me glad that I put so few of my frocks in the cases. The only way to console oneself is to think that even with the duty added, they cost about half what they would if one bought the materials and had them made up here.

Well, the end of it was that C—— came home late in the afternoon and told me that the duty came to 300 pesos—a little over £30!—and did I think the things were worth it, or should we send them back to Hong Kong in bond?

After we had discussed the matter, going into it all carefully, we came to the conclusion that we could not find substitutes for our things here for that sum. So we decided to take them, and the cases were brought up here by coolies, two or four carrying each one slung with bejuco ropes on to a hard-wood pole.

It is very nice to have all our own things about, but all the same it is a fearful hardship to have to pay their value for things that belong to us, and particularly annoying in the case of the wedding presents.

This, the arrival of the cases, has been the great excitement of the week, and from the look of the box-room, bids fair to continue to excite all hands for some time to come.

When we get the sketches hung up, the house will look very pretty, I think, and we are going to have some of them put in some frames that came in an old case full of C——’s things from Cebú. They will look very nice done up with enamel, and we can get some glass at a Chinaman’s shop, but all “crystal” comes from outside, of course, and is subject to a very heavy duty. You may be surprised, perhaps, to hear me mention Chinese shops so much, but nearly all the “stores” in the Philippines are kept by Chinamen, one (as I told you) by an English company here, and I don’t know if there are others, but I fancy not, and the rest by Spaniards and Germans. The chief businesses, big trading firms, are English all through the islands, and have been so for fifty years or more; and there are some Spanish companies, dealing in tobacco chiefly, and besides these, one or two Germans and Swiss, who import their native productions. Nearly all the Americans are official, military, educational, or missionaries. I am told that a few of the American soldiers, when the war was, or was said to be over, settled down on small plantations in the southern islands, and there are some saloon-keepers in the towns, a boot shop in Manila, and a struggling mechanic here and there; but so far, that is the extent of the American business interest in the place. Planters bringing in capital, such as our colonies profit by, do not, and never can, come into this country, for a new American law exists which prohibits all persons who are not natives from acquiring more than 40 acres of Philippine soil, and 40 acres in the tropics is not worth having, I believe.

I rigged up my bed with my own pillow-cases and sheets yesterday. They were delicious to sleep in, and the idea of linen pillow-cases for coolness and cotton sheets for health is excellent, for a cotton pillow-covering would be very hot and uncomfortable, and linen sheets would be dangerous in such heat. I have got myself an iron bed with a wire mattress, for I cannot sleep on the Filipino bed, which is a little platform of woven cane, and quite hard and unyielding. They are wooden four-posters, these native beds, with a cotton roof, usually red, set off by a frill of lace all round the top, above the mosquito curtains. Some of the bedsteads I have seen, made of native woods, are very prettily carved round the pillars, and a really handsome piece of carving fills the space at each end to the height of two feet or so. All right so far as looks go, but the bed itself is an appalling instrument of torture to lie on, for in pattern and material it is the same as the seats of cane chairs, and as hard as iron—all for coolness. On the cane is spread a native grass mat called a petate; the luxurious and faddy add a sheet, but humbler folk sleep on the mat, which is aired in the sun every day, or ought to be, and frequently washed. In the bed there always lies a small, round bolster, called in Spanish an embrasador, but the Europeans name it Dutch Wife, and this is used to fling a leg and an arm over, for, in this climate, to lie with the limbs touching would be intolerable discomfort. It is also a well-known fact that the embrasador is a great protection for the stomach against chills and fevers, which are a danger towards the small hours of the morning. Bedclothes, in the way of covering, are out of the question, but in every bed a small, thin blanket lies folded up, ready for the sudden chill of a rainy night. Once or twice people have said to me: “It was so cold last night. I was shivering even with my blanket.” This is the winter to them, you see. I only wish it struck me in the same way, for though the nights are by no means stifling or anything like that, it would be delightful to feel cold now and then.

It is so difficult to realise that this is Christmas Eve—so odd to hear people talking of children’s parties; and Christmas trees seem absurdly out of place! The churches began to get excited some time ago, and for the last week some deadly bells have begun to clang before the dawn.

The dawn, by-the-bye, is not what I expected, for I have often read descriptions of the coming of the tropic day—that is, night one minute and broad daylight the next. I find, however, that there is a considerable interval of twilight, both morning and evening. The other day I read a book by a very well-known writer, in which a description was given of the dayspring in Egypt coming like “the opening of an oven door,” which I knew to be nonsense as applied to Egypt, and now I find the same sort of hyperbole about the tropics equally false; for I have watched the grey dawn come gradually nearly every morning here, and I sit reading on the balcony in the twilight, in the evening. It is certainly not a long twilight, but all one reads about the sun shooting up from the night into the tropic day, and so forth, must be what they call “word pictures,” because it is certainly not truth, or even decent exaggeration.

Christmas Day.—I always write my letters to you all at one sitting, but I had to break off yesterday before I considered that I had covered enough paper to satisfy you, and I feel I can’t begin again to-day without this fresh heading; though it is not like Christmas a bit, and I think the bright green palms, blue sea and sky, and scorching sun are a very poor substitute for the lovely brown and purples of the winter landscape at home, the invigorating cold, and the exquisite skeletons of oaks and elms.

I should not complain, though, for the weather here is really delicious just at present, with frequent heavy showers, which keep the vegetation fresh, and fill the water-tanks. There are lots of wells, in which the water is very hard, and people say it is sea-water filtered through the soil; and it must be so, for at high tide the wells are at their fullest, and quite brackish. So the water-supply one chiefly depends upon is that out of the rain-water tanks, which are fed from the corrugated roofs of the houses. However, it is not safe to drink even that unfiltered, and some people are very fanciful and boil it first, but that is rather absurd if one gets a good filter.

Out of the filter, Sotero, the head boy, fills up soda-water bottles, which he takes to the English Club, where they are laid on the ice for a charge of 2 cents apiece, and these, after an hour or two on the ice, give us very refreshing drinks. Good and light beer is to be had, brewed in Manila; it works out at about a shilling a bottle, and the Americans drink it, but the English people consider beer an unwholesome beverage in this climate, and stick to whisky and soda very faithfully. Some adopt the Spanish custom of drinking light red wine, vino tinto, which is supposed to be strengthening and blood-making in a country where the prevailing trouble is anæmia. This wine comes from Spain in barrels, and I expect it really is the most wholesome of all. For my part, I keep pretty generally to lime juice and soda, or lemon squash. Lemons, which come from China, are about 2d. apiece. At this season, in the way of fruit, small tangerines are to be had also, hailing from China, and oranges, another luxury, 6d. each. It is rather a bore that such necessary and wholesome fruit should cost such ridiculous prices. Bananas, everlasting bananas, are the chief fruit, and even they are not astonishingly cheap, as they are sold here at exactly the same price as in London. Vegetables there are none, except miserable tomatoes and egg-plants. The lack of fresh fruit and vegetables is very trying, especially the vegetables. Whatever is sold is imported, except the bananas, tomatoes, and egg-plants. Fresh meat, too, would be a boon, and butter, and milk, for all these can only be obtained tinned—“canned” as they call it here. Once a week we get some provisions from the Cold Storage in Manila, Australian meat and butter, and sometimes vegetables, but this is only a private enterprise of a few of the English community, who club together and get down an ice-chest by the Butuan, the weekly Manila mail. It would be unwise to venture to lay in more than one day’s supply, which has to be cooked and eaten at once before it goes bad, even with an ice-chest to stand it in.

It might be possible to put up with these discomforts with more or less philosophic calm, and not mind the deprivations if they were inevitable, but they are not so by any means, as the soil of the Philippines is one of the richest in the world, volcanic and full of natural chemical manures, the islands having also every sort of advantage and variety of climate from the plains to the mountain-tops, and being plentifully watered. I am for ever being told that anything and everything will grow and flourish here, which is so aggravating when all the fresh food to be procured is miserable poultry, fish, and egg-plants, tomatoes you would not look at in England, and costly bananas. Rice and potatoes from China, live cattle from China, or frozen meat from Australia, and everything else under the sun in tins from London or America! This, after six years of what we are told is the most enlightened system of Colonial or Tropical Government yet invented. It is useless to point out that no roads exist inland, except one in Luzon for the Governor and his family to go to the hills; or to remark that labour is too dear for any enterprise to pay, and that all healthy foreign competition in the way of labour is excluded—the reply is an invitation to contemplate the splendid work that is being done in education. For these schools and swarming schoolmasters this pastoral country is taxed and tariffed to breaking point—schools to which the natives are being taken from the fields, and in which they are taught a crude wash of bad English and mathematics. The chief result is to bring all the “scholars” into the towns to loaf along in clerkships, if they can get them.

You will laugh at my vehemence! But it does seem such a pity to see a splendid country wasted, as it were, thrown away, for the sake of a windy theory propounded by some well-meaning though ignorant sentimentalists at the other side of the globe.

LETTER VII.
CUSTOMS AND DRESS OF THE NATIVES

Iloilo, December 31, 1904.

I think you may be amused to hear about a Filipino Fiesta, which took place yesterday, called Rizal Day—the anniversary of the death of the national hero, a Filipino of the name of Doctor Rizal. He was the William Tell of the Philippines, except that his existence was a reality, not a myth, for he died only eight years ago.

This patriot obtained the degree of Doctor (of Philosophy and Medicine) in Spain, where he went to be educated and enlightened. When he returned from that land, Doctor Rizal set to work, endeavouring to free his countrymen from the frightful Spanish friars, who were the real rulers of the Spanish Philippines, and whose cruelty and wickedness were almost incredible. Any friars who were not good enough for Spain, were sent out to the Philippines, where each man became a little god and tyrant in a tiny pueblo (village or district), in which his authority was unbounded and unquestioned. I suppose some of these friar-priests must have been good men, but no one can tell me they ever heard of such a being, for the enervating climate, lazy life, complete irresponsibility, and the irresistible power of the priest over the superstitious, childish Malays were too much for these men of God; and the stories of their cruelties, rapacities, and immoralities are all terrible and often simply sickening. I have heard them from people who lived in the pueblos, and the things that went on were like the Decameron and the Inquisition rolled into one.

Well, this Doctor Rizal started a revolt against the power of these dreadful men, if one could call the friars by such a name, about 1872; and from that time the rest of his life was a series of plots, captures, escapes to Europe, imprisonment by the friars, banishment, return, recapture, till at last, by the simple device of the friars having Rizal cabled for to Spain and getting him back to the Philippines, the avenging Church had him executed, by order of the Spaniards, on the Luneta, the Promenade at Manila, on December 30, 1896. I have met people who were present at the execution of Rizal, and they tell me that the crowds were vast, and relate how Rizal faced a line of soldiers bravely and was shot. Rizal had a nice, clever face of a refined Filipino type, if one can trust the portraits on the Conant bank-notes, and the Filipinos simply adore his memory.

It was in consequence of Rizal’s revolt that Aguinaldo and the Katipunan arose, who lived to revenge their hero’s memory, completing his work by turning the Spaniards and their dreadful priests out of the Islands. To do this, as you know, they had to get America to help them; which the Americans did, and stayed on. The idea is that they are going to teach the Filipinos how to govern themselves, which, it appears, ought only to be done by all peoples and races after the American method. The Filipinos are said to be delighted about this, but the puzzling anomaly is that they fought, and are still fighting the Americans tooth and nail to get their own liberty, their own way, but they are not asked what they think at all, and if they show any signs of wanting to get rid of this American burden and govern themselves in their own fashion, they are called Insurgents and knocked on the head, or dubbed common robbers and strung up to a tree.

On account of this state of affairs, the natives seize on this anniversary to give relief to some of their patriotic emotions. The day is a public holiday, they hang out flags and lanterns, and every Filipino knocks off what little work he ever does, and crawls about the streets and spits, and every one of them who is not carrying some musical instrument, is to be seen taking a cock to or from a cock-fight; while the women slouch along in gangs with myriads of children, or else jolt up and down in hired carriages—and that is the Fiesta.

They abandon these delirious joys during the hot hours of the day, from two to four, but swarm out again in redoubled numbers in the evening, walking about the streets till midnight in long processions, carrying paper lanterns of every shape and colour, and led by a guitar and mandoline band; while nearly every house is lighted up, and the big room full of people dancing.

The Filipinos have a natural gift for music of a very light sort, and I am told by people, who I do not think are very competent judges, that the natives perform classic music pretty well too, when well directed. Everyone plays an instrument of some sort, the men forming themselves into little and large societies, bands, in fact, which, on an occasion like yesterday, go about the streets and play “Hiawatha” on the slightest provocation. The trail of Sousa and “rag-time” is over them all, and their own plaintive, minor melodies, some of them very beautiful, are never heard now. At least I say “their own” melodies, but these tunes have a great flavour of Spain about them, and, of course, after four centuries of Spanish influence, it is difficult to say what is original Malay and what is imported.

The dress of the women is a mixture of the two races—Malay and Spanish—for the tight skirt (which is not worn in Manila, by-the-bye) is the sarong of the Straits; and the muslin blouse or jacket, with its huge starched sleeves and panuelo (a sort of folded fichu collar which sticks up behind) is an interesting survival of the fashions in vogue in Europe, in the days when Spain took these Islands on one side of the globe, and fought the mariners of Elizabeth on the other. Beyond these two garments the outfit is simplicity itself, for it consists of one long cotton chemise. I don’t think you’ve ever seen a sarong, by-the-bye, which, when it is off, is like a bottomless sack; and when it is on, is drawn tightly across the back and tucked in over itself at the top, when it makes an outline exactly like the petticoats in Egyptian monuments, quite close at the back, with a fold like a kilt in front. Then over the upper part comes the muslin bodice, which is made in one piece, with a hole to slip over the head, after the fashion of a jibbah. It looks very cool, but the cut is clumsy, and the fashion is dwarfing to the tiny Filipino figures; while the big sticking-up collar gives a round-shouldered effect, and spoils what is one of their best points, a graceful set and carriage of the head and neck. They walk very straight, with all the motion from the hips, and their feet very much turned out, and generally wear no jewellery of any sort, except perhaps a pair of gold earrings, or a ring or two, or a rosary of European patterns. There is nothing characteristic in the way of native work or beads. The well-to-do Filipino women wear more trinkets, and the Mestizas (Eurasians) cover themselves with cheap and tawdry ornaments.

The favourite material for the camisa (bodice) is a native muslin woven from the fibres of pine-apple leaves, called piña, an exclusive manufacture of the Islands of Panay and Negros, where the pine-apples grow wild in the jungles. This the Filipino women weave with or without silk stripes and checks, and dye all sorts of colours; but the lower classes and peasants hardly ever wear anything beyond the plain, undyed yellowish-white, which, after all, suits them far better than any other colour. They look well though, on great occasions, in crimson, purple, or yellow, and they are wise when they stick to those warm colours, for blues and greens are fatally unbecoming to their yellow-brown skins, making them look heavy and dirty. They seem to have no natural taste for colour though, as they use some appalling aniline dyes, and make mixtures which set one’s teeth on edge. They are only really safe when they stick to the red sarong and undyed camisa.

The piña is woven on hand-looms, which can be seen and heard clicking in almost every hut, and it is sent all over the Islands, and fetches enormous prices, but then it is practically everlasting, and when washed and done up with rice-starch, it looks like new.

They also have a muslin, much cheaper stuff, called Jusi (pronounced Hoosee), which is made from a fibre procured in China; and a third, and still cheaper one woven from hemp fibres and called sinamay—and the result of it all is that to the uninitiated the three materials all look exactly alike! On the piña the women do a very beautiful embroidery of graceful designs worked out in fine white sewing-cotton and marvellously shaded, mixed with drawn threads, and some of the antique pieces are exquisite. This piña embroidery is the only characteristic Filipino work I have been able to see or hear of, except the decoration of some weapons, and the grass mats with patterns.

The dress of the men I think I have already hinted at, and it, too, is the last word in simplicity (short of the loin-cloth, which costume is not allowed in the towns), for all the Filipinos wear in the house is tight drawers and a vest, and when they go out they draw on over those a pair of white or blue cotton trousers and a collarless shirt, rather like a Chinaman’s coat, which I described to you before, I think. This shirt hangs outside the trousers, really looking much better than it sounds, and on galas and occasions of state they turn out in an ordinary European shirt, with a starched front, all pleated and embroidered, such as Frenchmen and Germans sometimes wear, and they look so clean and smart in them. In fact they look quite nice in their native costume, but unfortunately many of them now affect the white man’s buttoned-up linen coat, with stand-up starched collar, and put on shoes and stockings, which subtly vulgarises the wearers at once. Like all coloured races and many white ones, as soon as they attempt modern European fashions the Filipino taste is villainous, and they look inexpressibly common and disheartening.

They are so clean—so scrupulously clean—all their clothes, even those of the very poorest, being spotless and fresh. They are for ever washing their bodies, too, or at least it is certain that the poor people are, for they may be seen at the wells and outside their houses tubbing ingenuously, the men with a single fold of stuff retained for decency, the women struggling inside a wet sarong.

We went yesterday evening for a walk along the beach, on the side of this spit where the view embraces the open sea and the end of the Island of Guimaras, the latter with a promontory of mountainous Negros jutting out behind and beyond it, and all the rest clear horizon. The tide was out, so we walked on the firm wet sand at the edge of the waves, little, flat waves which did not run up very far, as the beach is steep and shelving. Over the mountains, inland, the sky was a deep glowing orange and crimson, but from where we were on the beach we could not see the mountains, only glimpses of the gorgeous colour through the high palms that fringe the shore; while on the other side, out to sea, was a reflection like a delicate wash of pinky gold, set above deep blue sea and purple islands.

We walked a good long way, as far as the ends of the streets that come down on the beach, all dark with points of light, for the air was deliciously soft and the breeze almost fresh, and as the sunset faded, the stars came out and made quite a light upon the water, they looked so big and bright. We enjoyed the walk very much, and though we are too far this side of the town to be able to walk as far as the open country, we are very lucky not to be a long way from the beach, where we can always get a breath of fresh air and admire the lovely evenings.

LETTER VIII.
SOCIAL AMUSEMENTS

Iloilo, January 8, 1905.

This is my first letter to you in the New Year, and it does seem so strange to be writing 1905 already.

I wonder how you brought the year in. We were invited to a ball given by the Club Artistica, the Spanish Club, situated in a suite of very large rooms in the upper story of a big house in the Calle Real, the main street of the town, which I told you about when I was describing the amazing shops. The big basements are shops, but the long upper stories form large dwelling houses, very swagger ones, only the dust and noise are very disagreeable, and the rents about the same as flats in the best part of London, if not more. On these two accounts, most of them stand empty, displaying long rows of closed shutters, all the outside painted the prevailing bluey-grey. Some are used as clubs, however, one being this Artistica, and another, further down the street, the Filipino Club, which is called the Santa Cecilia—dedicated very appropriately to the patron saint of music, you see. These two clubs are very hospitable, and do nearly all the entertaining in the place, except for an occasional lecture at the Y.M.C.A., which, I daresay, is a wild revel, only I’ve never summoned up courage to go and see. The Swiss and Germans have a club, I believe, and the English Club has a beautiful house of its own, but neither of these institutions does anything towards the gaiety of nations, beyond playing billiards among their own members exclusively. It is a relief, however, to think that the poor fellows do not have such a very bad time as one might imagine, for they accept everything and go everywhere. The same comforting remark applies to the Americans, who have no club and don’t entertain privately, except tea or Bridge parties amongst each other. So, as I said before, it falls to the Spaniards and Filipinos to keep the place alive, and very well they do it too, if the ball on New Year’s Eve was a specimen of their average entertainments.

The Spaniards, Eurasians, and natives are all passionately fond of dancing, and really fond of it, for they do not make it a question of supper, as people do at home. All you have to do here is to clear the floor and get in some musicians (half the difficulty here is to keep groups of musicians out), and apparently your friends flow in. When we are coming home in the evenings, we often see the salas of quite little houses lighted up and full of people dancing, and I have seen small native huts having a baile of two couples jostling round in a space 10 feet square.

The chief room of the Spanish Club is a large apartment, almost a hall, where, on ordinary evenings, the members can be seen through the big lighted window-spaces, sitting about at little tables, with glasses at their elbows, playing dominoes; but for the baile the club was cleared and hung with electric lights in paper flowers, and decorated with flags and palm branches, while in a large recess at one side was a numerous string band of Filipino performers.

The music was excellent, but so slow that, as far as I was concerned, dancing was no pleasure, though that was not much of a grievance to me, as I was really far more anxious to look on than to dance.

We were invited for ten o’clock, but when we arrived at eleven the entertainment was only just getting into full swing. We had missed the opening Rigodon, a dance without which no Filipino baile could get under weigh at all, but the second half of the programme began with one, and I was very much interested to see it.

Everyone who wanted to dance the Rigodon, and there were only about three people who did not, sat round the room in an immense square, as for a cotillon, and the band struck up a very jolly old Spanish tune, to which the sides facing each other went through a few simple figures at a very slow walk. When they had done, they sat down, and the other two sides took their turn; and that, to different tunes, was the whole dance, which went on for an incredible length of time. The figures were a mixture of lancers and quadrilles, but the dancers never went out of a dignified strut, and though the first tune was followed by the inevitable Sousa marches and “Hiawatha,” however lively the music became, the dancers continued to stroll and bow and shuffle about at the same slow pace. I am told that one becomes very fond of the Rigodon, but it seemed to me intolerably dull and listless as a dance, though as a spectacle it was vastly entertaining, and gave one a chance of really seeing the people, and they were well worth the trouble of turning out after dinner to look at.

The men wore white suits, most of them buttoned-up white coats of the every day sort. There were three Englishmen in evening dress, one or two in white mess jackets, and several advanced young Filipinos in grey tweeds. The American women wore every sort of outfit, from the missionaries and schoolma’ams in blouses and boots to the more exalted personages in evening dress; while the Filipinas, Mestizas, and most of the Spaniards had on the native muslin camisa, some of them exquisitely embroidered and hand-painted, and always worn with European skirts of appalling colours and cut. One little brown woman had on a long train of scarlet plush, with huge white lace butterflies fixed across and down the front, which made one burst into perspiration merely to look at; and another was in emerald green velvet, with straggling bands of gold braid meandering over it in such a queer way that I could not resist walking round her to see if any point of view would make the lines come out as a pattern, but they refused to go by any rule of any art—even the “newest.”

As to the waltzes, which formed the chief part of the programme, they were very amusing too, for the variety of styles was infinite, though the universal pace was so slow. The Spaniards and Mestizos dance very well, and by that, of course, I mean Filipinos in general, for it is very difficult to distinguish between them, and to say where one race begins and the other leaves off. They are slow and graceful. The Americans are equally slow, but not very graceful, for they walk instead of dance, holding each other in such a peculiar way, sideways and very close, the man leaning very far back, with his partner falling towards him, and the hands that are clasped held very high, and swinging up and down.

At twelve o’clock everyone began to cheer and shake hands as the New Year came in; while the band played the American National Anthem, which is a most magnificent air, and then the Spanish Anthem, and then a few bars of “God Save the King,” which did for us and the Germans equally well, and which we all thought a very nice little compliment. Filipino waiters came in, carrying trays covered with tall glasses full of some sort of champagne cup, and everyone drank healths, shook hands, and wished their friends a Happy New Year. We stayed on a little longer, and I danced a two-step with a very nice American, which was the best dance I had the whole evening, for it is one in which they excel, though they perform it quite differently to what we are told at home is “the real American way to dance it,” as they do not plunge down the room in straight lines in the English fashion, but turn round more and make more of a waltz of it.

Suddenly, during an interval between dances in the middle of the programme, without a word of warning, a Mestiza sat down at the piano and played an accompaniment to which a young Eurasian, in a painfully blue satin dress, and with her face a ghastly grey-white with thick powder, sang a truly terrible song. She screamed in an awful manner, and I wondered that policemen did not rush up from the streets to see what was the matter, but she was perfectly self-possessed, and faced the audience with the aplomb and self-confidence of a prima-donna. I never heard such “singing” in my life—it was the sort of thing that is so bad that you feel all hot and ashamed, and sorry, and don’t want to catch the eye of any relation of the performer. This happened not once, but several times, and is, I am told, a custom in Filipino bailes.

When we left at about half-past one, the ball was in full swing, and I afterwards heard that it went on till half-past four or five. Indefatigable people! I don’t know how they can keep it up so, for, of course, the heat was very great—a temperature in which no one would dream of dancing at home, and not a breath of cool air anywhere, but I suppose they become accustomed to it.

One thing I have mentioned may strike you as odd, and that is the mixture of races and Eurasians, but there is socially no marked colour-distinction here as in every other country in the world, and this, I imagine, is because the natives of the civilised parts of the Philippines have been Christians for centuries, and intermarried with a Christian race. The fusion is not, however, really very complete, as one can see from a glance, at any gatherings, where the people of various shades of white and brown keep very much together. Some of the Eurasian women are quite pretty, but they spoil their little round faces with thick layers of powder over their nice brown skins, and use perfumes that nearly knock one down. The white men are friendly with many of the Mestizos, and dance with their pretty daughters, and are even occasionally foolish enough to marry the latter; but white women keep quite apart from the coloured folk, and it would be an unheard-of thing to dance with one; while as to marrying a Filipino, no woman one could speak to would ever dream of such a horrible fate. That is where the real impassable gulf is fixed. The Americans profess not to recognise any distinction, however, for, as I explained before, they announce that they consider the Filipino of any class as their social and every other equal, and have the expression “little brown brother” (invented by Mr. Taft), which is supposed to convey and establish this generous sentiment. The sentiment, apart from any political utility it may possess, is a noble one, but it does more credit to the heart of the Americans than to their wisdom.

The Spaniards did not recognise the Filipinos as equals, but treated them with every courtesy, according to their degree, and I believe that whatever the political situation may have been in those days, society went peaceably enough, for every man knew his place and kept it; a system admirably suited to an Oriental people. Now, however, the régime is quite different, and the sudden glare of ultra-equalising views is what the Filipinos can neither understand nor profit by.

I wish I had been in the U.S.A to see many things for myself, but I have always read and heard much about the hard and fast line drawn in that country against “coloured” people and half-castes, and that the Americans have learned to adopt this custom from years of experience. This makes their professed attitude here very puzzling, and I can find no one who can even attempt to reconcile this extraordinary variation of opinion. Another unfathomable anomaly of American thought is that the “Equality,” Nobility of the Human Race—Rights as a human Being, and so on, are for the Filipinos, but all these grand schemes officially take no account of the fierce, naked savages; the Mahommedan tribes; the negritoes, and all the other wild natives of the Philippines; though how, or where, or when, or by whom the line is to be drawn and the distinction made is another unanswerable problem.

New Year’s Day being a holiday, we thought we would treat ourselves to a drive. So we sent one of the boys out for a carromata, which is a sort of tiny gig, with the driver sitting on a small seat in front of his fare, in fact almost on one’s lap. Rain had been falling pretty well all day, and the carromata, when it arrived, was covered with mud, and looked such a disreputable turn-out that we burst out laughing when we saw it. However, there was no other to be had, and after all it was a very good specimen, so we climbed in over the wheel, and the driver, a boy of about twelve, gave the pony a chuck and a whack, and it turned round in the direction of the Plaza, and we stuck. Then the driver got down, and when he was out of the way and the pony became visible, we saw that we weighed the cart down so much at the back that as the little animal turned round he got his neck wedged under the shaft and was held in a rigid yoke. The youthful cochero shoved him down somehow, evidently both of them quite accustomed to the trouble, and, once righted, the little beast tore along, and we had a delightful drive in the cool of the evening, enjoying the air, which was so fresh after the rain.

We did not go far out of the town, as the sky was rather threatening, but kept more or less to the ever-amusing suburbs of native huts, which literally swarm with human beings, to every one of whom there is apparently an allowance of about six babies of under one year old, and on the roofs are cocks and hens clinging to the steep thatch; while under the hut lives the family carabao (a big grey water-buffalo) in his mudhole, along with stray dogs and wild pigs which eat up the refuse.

The number of children, very young children, is something astounding, but, according to statistics, I learn that 60 per cent. of the children born in the Philippines die under one year old, so that must help to keep the numbers of grown-up people down a bit. They are miserable little languid scraps, thin and solemn, but so supremely fortunate as to wear no clothes whatever, till they are about six, when a short muslin jacket is put on, which is more for adornment than anything else. The tiny ones ride astride the mother’s hip, with little thin legs dangling, and round black head wobbling about, looking so uncomfortable, poor little souls. They are fed on rice, which they eat till their little bodies swell up to a certain tightness, when the food is taken away, and they are not allowed more till they have “gone down” again. This process results in a permanent “rice-tummy,” which makes the babies look like air-balloons set on drumsticks; but, somehow, they lose that as they get older, and if they live, are generally very slender and well made.

There is a great fuss made now about this waste of infant life, much of which is ascribed to the horrible and unhuman practices and superstitions attending the birth of a Filipino child; but I imagine from the appearance of the children themselves, that the whole question is merely an example of the Survival of the Fittest, for of so many children born in such a delicate race there must be numbers who are unable and unfit to live. They are not a hardy people, these Filipinos, and the heat, fevers, and plagues of the country affect them even more than they do the white races, oddly enough. I believe that in the wild parts the natives are stronger, and sometimes live to a great age; but there the life is simpler; the cross-breeding less frequent; in the absence of civilisation of any kind the great Darwinian Law operates even more rigorously; and the young who are sickly stand no chance at all of growing up and transmitting their weakness. The skin of these people is not a healthy skin, not a warm brown, but of a greeny-yellowy brown; their fingers are delicate and weak, and their eyes not clear or bright, but like little bits of dull plum-brown jelly.

LETTER IX.
TARIFFS—INSECTS

Iloilo, January 16, 1905.

The day has come round for me to catch the mail, but I feel that I can hardly write calmly, as I am barely sane upon the subject I wish to tell you about, which is the Customs. I told you about the opening of our cases, and how we took them out of bond, as they were valued at £30? Well, a day or two ago the bill came in, and when we saw it we nearly fainted away, for the amount of duty came to 698 pesos—£70.

Of course we thought some mistake had been made, so C—— went off to the Customs officer and asked him what it meant. All the consolation we got was that they were very sorry for us, but the Appraiser had made a mistake, and classed some of our things under Class B instead of Class A.

So C—— said he could not afford this sum, which was far more than the whole of the contents of the cases were worth if they had been new. Of course it was impossible to send them back to Hong Kong, as we had taken them out of bond; but after a lot of talk, the officer said we could “abandon the goods” if we liked, which means refuse to pay the duty, when the things would be seized by the Customs and sold by auction to pay the Government; but we should be unable, by law, to buy them in ourselves. This seemed to be the only alternative open to us, and C—— came back and asked me what I thought of it, and asked the other Englishmen their opinion. They were full of sympathy and very kind, and at last one of them hit upon an excellent idea, which was to attend the sale and buy our things in for us as cheaply as possible. This, then, was arranged, but—“Oh no!” said the Customs, “you won’t gain anything by that, because if goods, when put up for sale, do not fetch the price at which the Customs House has valued them, they are publicly burned.”

So that is the end of our story. We have paid more than their value for our wedding-presents, which seems to me the meanest and cruellest imposition I ever heard of. But I won’t say any more, for the subject can only be as painful to you as it is to us. We must just grin and bear it, I suppose, but good-bye to a pony and trap for a longer time than ever, and good-bye to any little jaunts in the hot season.

I must try instead to be more pleasant, and the only thing I can think of is a little lizard I have been looking at for the last ten minutes, while my thoughts roamed gloomily over each one of those seventy good golden sovereigns that have gone to help to teach the Filipino that he is my equal. A worthy cause, no doubt, but one that does not appeal to me—at any rate to the extent of 698 pesos.

This little lizard, which lives in the cornice above my writing-desk, has just come down on to the window beside me and nipped up a fly in the smartest manner. This is his hunting-ground, for the windows in the house only have sliding shutters, such as I described to you, like all the houses here. Glass windows are almost unknown, but this house happens to have them along the S.-W. front, where some former occupant has put in doors on to the balcony, with glass in the upper panels, because in the rainy season the Monsoon drives in on this side.

In all the houses here these little grey lizards abound, living in the cornices and corners of the ceilings, and feeding on flies, mosquitoes, and any little toothsome creature they can pick up. They must have plenty of supplies and wide variety, for one seems to come across some new sort of insect every hour of the day—and night. No fleas, however, I don’t mean that, for Filipinos are clean and fleas are rare; but all sorts of queer insects crawl and fly and sit about, all of which I suppose the lizards enjoy; and I imagine they, in their turn, are having a good meal off some other still tinier creature.

The ceilings are made of bulges of canvas or matting painted white, pale blue, or green; or, in some of the old houses, with patterns, as in Italy. In one house in Jaro, a big building with long, wide-open window-spaces, there is a ceiling that is covered with some sort of shiny oilcloth stuff, drawn up by buttons at intervals, so that it looks like the seat of some giant padded leather chair—a most fearful looking contrivance, but, no doubt, a source of much pride to the Filipino who owns it. There is a wide space above these ceilings, for the corrugated iron roofs are very deep, and here live rats, mice, cats, cockroaches, snakes, all sorts of beasts, which come down into the house for plunder. The nicest are these dear, clean, bright-eyed little lizards, which make a funny and very pretty note, a sort of clear, musical chuck-chuck. Sometimes, but very rarely, one of these lizards is found with a forked tail, and this the natives look upon as an emblem of the most extraordinary luck, and they do all they can to catch the lizard and try to take off his forked tail, which they dry and wear for anting-anting. Any kind of luck, or lucky emblem, is anting-anting, and the mystical emblems, observances, and relics of Roman Catholicism, which appeal to the Filipinos with irresistible force, have but added to their original stock of superstitions.

In some of the houses there is a very anting-anting lizard, of a large size, which makes a loud, clear double note like a cuckoo, that can be heard a long way off. I have never seen a “Philippine cuckoo,” as they are called, but have often heard them, and the houses that have this anting-anting are well known. There is one in the old belfry at Jaro, another in a house the other side of the Plaza there, and one in a certain bamboo clump on the road to Molo, and so on, all over the place.

A very general belief prevails that in the roof of each house there lives a big snake, which has a terrific meal of rats every now and then, and sleeps the rest of his time, coming down very rarely for water. I can quite credit this story, for the space between the roofs must be the very place for a snake, and many people tell me they have seen these creatures, but I don’t suppose they are really in all the houses. Curiously enough, I thought there was a snake overhead before I had ever been told about such a thing, for one day, when I was sitting in the sala, I heard a most extraordinary noise in the roof overhead—a sort of heavy, dragging sound, and then a thump, and then the dragging sound again—and, somehow, the thought of a snake instantly came into my mind. When I spoke about it to some friends, half jokingly, they replied quite seriously that it probably was a snake I had heard, and then told me how they live in the roofs.

Talking of noises, one of the most curious sounds here is made by the crickets, the cicadas, which shrill night and day, ceaselessly and for ever. The ear becomes accustomed to the aggregate sound of their high, thin note, though I, for one, never get to like it, and sometimes it gets horribly on my nerves, so that I feel I must go anywhere to get away from it. At first when I heard it I was always having a curious impression of being in a Swiss field in the summer; but now that has worn off, and I think if I ever go into the Swiss fields again I shall think of nothing but Iloilo. When one of these cicadas gets very near the house, it drives you nearly mad, and when, as happened a few evenings ago, one is actually in the house, everything must be searched for the beast before anyone can expect sanity or sleep. This one that got in, stowed itself away in the writing-table, and we had an awful time, standing almost on our heads and streaming from every pore, before we found it in a tiny corner where one of the drawers does not run quite into place. When we fished the cicada out at last, or rather when one of the servants came in and took up the hunt for us and caught it, we found the disturber of our peace to be an ugly little browny-black creature, with a narrow waist, and the silly thing refused to give a single chirrup to show us how it was done.

Talking of insects, one of the things we are most fortunate about in this house is that we have very few of the black or red ants, which are a fearful plague in these Islands, so much so that one has to stand the furniture with its feet in small enamel bowls filled with water or paraffine to prevent the ants crawling up, for they eat everything; and besides that, they look particularly nasty when dead in jam or butter, or floating in tea or coffee. Some of these ants are a good size, but the common sort are very small, and many of the most destructive are simply red specks that run like lightning. They are terrible destroyers, and I can’t think why ant-eaters don’t start living in the roof menageries, for they would get on splendidly if they did not die of over-eating. However, the ants do scavenge to a certain extent, and the way a busy little mob can carry off a huge dead cockroach is a lesson in natural history.

The cockroaches, by-the-bye, are the size of mice. They are the most evil brutes I ever saw, besides being a constant source of terror and worry. You will hardly believe this, for you know that I never mind touching any animal—mice, worms, toads, slugs, earwigs—and how I have so often been laughed at, and even sniffed at, as rather an unpleasant young person, because I have no repugnance to taking them up in my bare hand, for, after all, they are only poor animals, and infinitely nicer to touch than many perfectly respectable human beings. Do you remember those people at Karnak who screamed when I brought them that lovely little toad with a speckled stomach? And the good folk at home who shudder if you pick up a poor slug out of a dusty road? Well, when it comes to these cockroaches, I confess that I have a genuine horror of the great red, evil-smelling brutes, with their horrible bulgy eyes and their long moving red antennæ. I can’t tell you what it is about them—but I am not alone in this, for everyone has a horror of them. They breed in the cesspits, and prefer manure to any other diet, but will gladly supplement their menu with any form of food, as well as leather, paper, books, or clothes. The houses, the shops, and the steamers are full of them, and in the evenings they come out of their holes and run about. Ugh! they make one shudder. And every now and then they take it into their heads to fly about or into the lighted rooms, and I have even seen men who have been here for years turn quite sick when a cockroach lights on them, and as for the average woman, she screams outright, and many white women faint.

These horrible brutes are the curse of housekeeping, necessitating everything being kept in glass jars or tins, and cupboards and drawers being overhauled and searched every week or so. I must say, though, that we have not had so much trouble with them as most people, and so far I have never had one amongst the linen or clothes, and I believe this is because I hang cakes of naphthaline in the rooms, and put balls of it in all boxes, drawers, and cupboards, and they don’t seem to like naphthaline, though they would come a thousand miles to eat ordinary insect powder, which is, apparently, just the very thing on which to bring up a nice little family of forty or fifty young cockroaches.

There are some pleasing spiders too, one of which I saw the other day, with a body nearly the size of the palm of my hand, sitting in a huge, tough web like a hammock, and looking exactly like those in Doré’s picture of the Guest Chamber in the Castle Inn, in Croque Mitaine.

I said there were very few fleas, but the mosquitoes make up for any biting that has to be done. I am beginning to get more accustomed to their venom now, but at first I was quite ill and feverish from it, and many people suffer so that it amounts to an illness, and white men frequently have to be invalided home for nothing but mosquitoes. Nothing I have ever seen in any place round the Mediterranean approaches the Philippine mosquito for venom or ferocity, and here, too, their efforts are not confined to the night-season when lucky mortals are stowed under nets with no rents in them, but they bite relentlessly all day as well.

Well, I tried to leave harrowing subjects and tell you something more cheerful than the Customs woes, but I seem to have drifted into other griefs, and as my spirits are evidently damped beyond hope to-day, I had better leave off writing and end my letter.

LETTER X.
A FILIPINO THEATRE—CARABAOS

Iloilo, January 22, 1905.

We went a night or two ago to a performance at the theatre—a Filipino performance in a Filipino theatre. I daresay it sounds strange to you to hear of a theatre in Iloilo, but you see this is really a very large town, and then all the people are musical, and they have plenty of time to rehearse. They get together little dramatic clubs, the chief one of which is not far from here, “as the crow flies,” though I think he would be a very keen crow for theatricals if he flew there as straight as he could. We heard this performance, an operetta, being rehearsed night and day before the performers considered it ready for the theatre. The rehearsals that went on until the early hours of the morning were those we cared least about; but we were really interested to hear them going on all day as well, for no one in the Dramatic Club apparently had any other occupation in life. At least, this seemed to me strange till I had become better acquainted with the Filipino character.

To get to this show, we set off after dinner, driving in a hired quielez with a disturbing cockroach somewhere about it, and soon came to a squash of all sorts of carriages and carts in one of the broader streets of the town—and a squash of vehicles driven by Filipinos is something no human mind can imagine without experience. We escaped alive, and went in at a big gateway into a courtyard, passing several stalls lighted with flaring naphtha, where native women sat behind flat rush trays containing cakes and sweetmeats, tumblers of coloured drinks, and ordinary ginger-beer and lemonade bottles. This, though I did not know it at the time, was the buffet.

Inside the courtyard another high gate, decorated at the sides with palms and paper roses, and very dimly lighted, led to the door of the theatre, a big, crazy-looking building, and here stood two inconceivably stupid and self-satisfied natives bullying everyone, and making a hopeless and baffling muddle of the tickets. Why they did this I can’t think, as everyone passed into the place alike, whatever their ticket was, and scrambled up a broad wooden staircase, very steep and rickety, or else went about the ground-floor, every man looking for his own seat, and getting turned out of it by the next comer.

The “boxes” were little pens railed off, containing six chairs with no room for your knees, and in and out of these and up and down the precipitous staircase jostled a crowd of Filipinos, Mestizos, Chinamen, and Spaniards, with little dark women in gaudy camisas, wearing flowers in their hair and diamond brooches. Here and there an American was patiently and persistently trying to gather information in his own language, while he took some female relation in a white cotton dress upstairs and then down again, to keep her quiet.

I was so amused by these proceedings that I really felt as if it did not matter whether that was all we saw, but, nevertheless, we toiled up the staircase at the promptings of an obliging Filipino with one eye, very soon found our box, and settled down to wait for the friends who were to join us.

In about two minutes, however, we were engaged in an endless discussion with a little mob of “brown brothers,” who declared quite politely that we had no right there, as the box was theirs. So we moved off and tried the ground-floor again; found another box with our number on it, empty; sat down again, put fans and programmes on the opposite chairs, and began to look about.

But we were shifted again, so this time we tackled a native selling programmes, and asked him where our box was, and why the little pens all seemed to have the same number; and he, in very broken Spanish, at last made us understand that the numbers were repeated six times, once on each side upstairs and down. This was a wonderful effort of lucidity for a Filipino, and really helped us a good deal. So we toiled upstairs again, feeling sure that we knew all about the theatre now, and determined on a shot at the sides. On the way there we were delighted to see that the people who had turned us out of our first box were being ousted in their turn, but by this time we had begun to giggle, and were too helpless with heat and laughter to take much notice of anything. At last we got into a box from which we were never evicted during the rest of the evening, though some people did come along with a programme-seller to back their claim, but we showed fight, and they went away again.

The theatre, a long, wooden building, appeared even more ramshackle from the inside than it had from the outside, and infinitely more dangerous, for the electric light was supplemented by Japanese paper lanterns, which looked the last word in incendiarism; and, when one considered the packed mass of faces all round, it was wiser not to let the imagination dwell on that steep wooden stairway, which was all there was between us and the next world.

The floor of the building was arranged with rows of chairs facing squarely, by way of stalls, surrounded by a row of the boxes I have described, where the chairs went sideways. Above jutted out a broad balcony with a similar row of boxes, and above that again, jammed under the ceiling, was a dense crowd of poor people, standing on what was really only a ledge with an iron rail; and they looked positively more like huge black and white flies clinging to the ceiling than anything else.

Everything looked as if it must fall down or break up, but no one seemed to be worrying about their doom, in fact all the faces were remarkably pleasant and jolly.

The stage was a fairly large one, with a row of electric footlights, which waxed and waned and waxed again at their own sweet will, and quite regardless of the needs of the performance. In front of the stage, on the floor-level, was an orchestra of natives who really played very well indeed, and they and all the men in the audience were in white, which looks very quaint until one’s eye is accustomed to it.

The piece performed was an operetta called “La Indiana,” a rather confused story about some old Mestizo with a white beard, whose son had secretly married an Indian, which is the word the Spaniards use for the Filipinos, and is employed by the Filipinos themselves as well, when talking Spanish. Well, the old father informed his son, an appalling, gawky, young Mestizo in a black morning coat, pepper and salt tweed trousers, and a very bright blue tie, that he must marry a white (Mestiza) girl of his, the father’s choosing. On hearing which, the hero sang a song to the effect that he would abandon the Indiana, and had a long duet with that personage to explain that they would just say nothing at all about being married. Then all the chorus came in again, the old father blessed the hero and the “white” girl, whereupon the Indiana, a frightfully ugly Filipina with a fine voice, sang a long and frenzied solo with her hair down—and then the curtain fell.

I thought there must be another act, and was very much surprised to find that was the conclusion of the story. But evidently, to the native imagination, the plot was complete and the ends of poetic justice satisfied. They did not really act and sing as badly as I had expected, though, when one came to think of “La Indiana” as a public performance in a theatre, it really verged on audacity. No attempt at scenery or dress was made, the whole action taking place in a bare, worn, old “set” of a room, the usual stage room, unlike anything else on earth, and the only attempt at costume was the substitution of very ugly old European blouses for the camisa, which was a fatal mistake.

We left after the first piece, though there were to be two more of the same sort, for it was very dull and depressing. There is nothing in these Filipinos, you see, for they have not the melodious voices of negroes, nor the faultless ear of Spaniards, nor the fine physique of Chinese, nor the taste of Japanese—they are simply dull, blunt, limited intelligences, with the ineffable conceit of such a character all over the world, and when they break out into a display such as “La Indiana,” all these deplorable qualities show up in the glare of the white light that beats even upon an Iloilo stage.

Yesterday we went for a delightful drive out along the Jaro road, off which we turned a little way beyond the town, and went down a rough, sandy track to the banks of a broad, half-dried-up river, not the Iloilo river, but another parallel to it, or a branch.

Riding a Carabao.