Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924084657299 In Compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 1998 OforttcU Mnittcratta Slihtatg Stljaca. Sfem ^adt CHARLES WILUAM WASON COLLECTION CHINA AND THE CHINESE THE G[FT OF CHARLES WTLLIAM WASON CLASS OF 1876 1918 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES BY JOSEPH EARLE STEVENS AN £X-,RESUJENT OF JlIANlLA ILLUSTRATED LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, & COMPANV Limiied J5t. JBunetan's ^oust Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E. C. i8q8 VI ^\o^ Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons for the Ur^ited States of America Printed by the Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company New York, U. S. A. IN MEM OR Y OF MY MOTHER CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Page xiii I Leaving " God's Country "—Hong Kong— Crossing to Luzon— Manila Bay— First View of the City— Eartliquake Precautions— Balco- nies and Window-gratings— The River Pasig— Promenade of the Malecon— The Old City— The Puente de Espana— Population— A Philippine Bed— The English Club— The Luneta— A Christmas Dinner at the Club Page i II Shopping at the " Botica Inglesa"— The Chit System— Celebrating New Year's Eve — Manila Cooking Arrangements — Floors and Windows — Peculiarities of the Tram-car Service — Roosters Ev- erywhere—Italian Opera — Philippine Music — The Mercury at 74° and an Epidemic of " Grippe "—Fight Between a Bull and a Tiger — A Sorry Fiasco — Carnival Sunday, Page 22 III A Philippine Valet — The Three Days Chinese New Year — Marionettes and Minstrels at Manila — Yankee Skippers — Furnishing a Bungalow — Rats, Lizards, and Mosquitoes — A New Arrival — Pony-races in Santa Mesa — Cigars and Cheroots — Servants — Cool Mountain Breezes— House-snakes— Cost of Living — Holy Week Page 4^ vm CONTENTS IV An Up-country Excursion— Steaming up the River to the Lake — Legend of the Chijia.rnan and the Crocodile— Santa Cruz and Pagsanjan— Dress of the Women— Mduritaih Gorges and River Rapids— Church Processions— Cocoanut Rafts— A " Carromata " Ride to Paquil— An Earthquake Lasting Forty-five Seconds — Small-pox and other Diseases in the Philippines — The Manila Fire Department — How Thatch Dealers Boom the Market— Cost of Living, Page 60 V Visit of the Sagamore — Another Mountain Excursion— The Caves of Montalvan— A Hundred-mile View — A Village School — A " Fi- esta " at Obando — The Manila Fire-tree — A Move to the Seashore — A Waterspout — Captain Tayler's Dilemma — A Trip Southward — The Lake of Taal and its Volcano — Seven Hours of Poling — A Night's Sleep in a Hen-coop Page S7 VI First Storm of the Rainy Season— Fourth of July — Chinese " Chow " Dogs— Crullers and Pie and a Chinese Cook— A Red-letter Day — ^The China^apajLWajC — Manila Newspapers— General Blanco and the Archbishop — An American Fire-engine and its Lively Trial — ^The Coming of the Typhoon — Violence of the Wind — The Floods Next — Manila Monotony Page 112 VII A Series of Typhoons — A Chinese Feast-day — A Bank-holiday Excur- sion—Lost in the Mist— Los Banos— The " Enchanted Lake "— Six Dollars for a Human Life — A Religious Procession — Celebra- tion of the Expulsion of the Chinese^Bicycle Races and Fire- works Page IJ7 CONTENTS IX VIII A Trip to the South— Contents of the " Puchero "— Romblon— Cebu, the Southern Hemp-centre — Places Touched At — A Rich Indian at Camiguin— Tall Trees— Primitive Hemp-cleaners — A New Volcano — Mindanao Island — Moro Trophies — Iligan — Iloilo — Back Again at Manila, Page i4g IX Club-house Chaff — Christmas Customs and Ceremonies — New Year's Calls — A Dance at the English Club — The Royal Exposition of the Philippines — Fireworks on the King's Fete Day— Electric Lights and the Natives— The Manila Observatory— A Hospitable Governor— The Convent at Antipolo, Page 17s Exacting Harbor Regulations— The Eleanor takes French Leave— Loss of the Gravina — Something about the Native Ladies — Ways of Native Servants — A Sculptor who was a Dentist— Across the Bay to Orani — Children in Plenty — A Public Execution by the Garrote, Page igs XI Lottery Chances and Mischances— An American Cigarette-making Machine and its Fate— Closing up Business— How the Foreigner Feels Toward Life in Manila — Why the English and Germans Return — Restlessness among the Natives — Their Persecution — Departure and Farewell, Page 213 CONCLUSION Page 2 JO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page How We Dressed for $2.50 Frontispiece Our Office and the Punkah under which the Old Salts Sat for Free Sea Breezes .... ... 8 Plaza de Cervantes, Foreign Business Quarter . . 14 Puente de Espana. Manila's Main Highway Across the Pasig . 2o The Busy Pasig, from the Puente de Espana . . . .26 A Philippine Sleeping-machine .... 32 The English Club on the Banks of the Pasig . . . 40 The Bull and Tiger Fight— Opening Exercises . . 46 Suburb of Santa Mesa 54 Our Destination was a Town Called Pagsanjan at the Foot of a Range of Mountains .60 The Rapids in the Gorges of Pagsanjan . . .66 Cocoanut Rafts on the Pasig, Drifting down to Manila . 72 The Little Native School under the Big Mango-tree . . 78 Calzada de San Miguel . . .... 84 A Native Village Up Country . . ... 90 A " Chow " Shop on a Street Corner . . 98 Puentes de Ayala, which Help two of Manila's Suburbs to Shake Hands Across the Pasig . . . . .106 Calzada de San Sebastian . . . . 114 xa LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS fage Ploughing in the Rice-fields with the Carabao . . . 122 Types of True Filipinos Waiting to Call Themselves Americans. 130 On the Banks of the Enchanted Lake . . . 138 In the Narrow Streets of Old Manila. A Procession . 144 A Citizen from the Interior . . .152 How the World's Supply of Manila Hemp is Cleaned . . 160 Moro Chiefs from Mindanao . 168 Manila Fruit-girls in a Street-Corner Attitude . . .176 A Typical " Nipa " House ... ... 184 The Little Flower-girl at the Opera . ... 192 Rapid Transit in the Suburbs of Manila 202 The Fourth of July, '95. Execution by the Garrote . . 210 Paseo de la Luneta . . 220 Captain Tayler, the Genial Skipper of the Esmeralda . . 226 Map of Philippines . . . . At End of Vohime INTRODUCTION By the victory of our fleet at Manila Bay, one more of the world's side-tracked capitals has been pulled from obscurity into main lines of prominence and the average citizen is no longer -left, as in days gone by, to suppose that Manila is spelt with two I's and is floating around in the South Sea somewhere between Fiji and Patagonia. The Philippines have been discovered, and the daily journals with their cheap maps have at last located Spain's Havana in the Far East. It is indeed curious that a city of a third of a million people — capital of a group of islands as large as New England, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, which have long furnished the whole world with its entire sup- ply of Manila hemp, which have exported some 160,000 tons of sugar in a single year and which to- day produce as excellent tobacco as that coming from the West Indies — it is curious, I say, that a city of this size should have gone so long unnoticed and mis- spelt. But such has been the case, and until Admiral Dewey fired the shots that made Mamla heard round XIV INTRODUCTION the world, the people of these United States — with but few exceptions — ^lived and died Avithout knowing where the stuff in their clothes-lines came from. Now that the Philippines are ours, do we want them? Can we run them ? Are they the long-looked- for El Dorado which those who have never been there suppose ? To all of which questions — even at the risk of being called unpatriotic — I am inclined to answer, No. Do we want them? Do we want a group of 1,400 islands, nearly 8,000 miles from our Western shores, sweltering in the tropics, swept with typhoons and shaken with earthquakes? Do we want to under- take the responsibility of protecting those islands from the powers in Europe or the East, and of stand- ing sponsor for the nearly 8,000,000 native inhabitants that speak a score of different tongues and live on anything from rice to stewed grasshoppers ? Do we want the task of civUizing this race, of opening up the jungle, of setting up officials in frontier, out-of- the-way towns who won't have been there a month before they will wish to return ? Do we want them? No. Why? Because we have got enough to look after at home. Because — unlike the EngUshman or the German who, early realizing that his country is too small to support him, grows up with the feeliag that he must relieve the burden INTRODUCTION xv by going to the uttermost parts of the sea — our young men have room enough at home in which to exert their best energies without going eight or eleven thousand mUes across land and water to tropic islands in the Far East. Can we run them ? The Philippines are hard ma- terial with which to make our first colonial experi- ment, and seem to demand a different sort of treat- ment from that which our national policy favors or has had experience in giving. Besides the peaceable natives occupjdng the accessible towns, the interiors of many of the islands are filled with aboriginal savages who have never even recognized the rule of Spain — who have never even heard of Spain, and who stiU think they are possessors of the soil. Even on the coast itself are tribes of savages who are almost as ignorant as their brethren in the interior, and only thirty miles from Manila are races of dwarfs that go without clothes, wear knee-bracelets of horsehair, and respect nothing save the jungle in which they live. To the north are the Igorrotes, to the south the Moros, and in between, scores of wild tribes that are ready to dispute possession. And is the United States prepared to maintain the forces and carry on the military operations in the fever-stricken jungles necessary in the march of progress to exterminate or civilize such races? Have we, like England for in- XVI INTRODUCTION stance, the class of troopd who could undertake that sort of work, and do we feel called upon to do it, when the same expenditure at home Avould go so much further ? The Philippines must be run under a despotic though kindly form of government, sup- ported by arms and armor-clads, and to deal with the perplexing questions and perplexing difficulties that arise, needs knowledge gained by experience, by hav- ing dealt with other such problems before. Are the Philippines an El Dorado ? Like Borneo, like Java and the Spice Islands, the Philippines are rich in natural resources, but their capacity to yield more than the ordinary remuneration to labor I much question. Leaving aside the question of gold and coal, in the working of which, so far, more money has been put into the ground than has ever been taken out, the great crops in these islands are sugar, hemp, and tobacco. The sugar crop, to be sure, has the possibilities that it has anywhere, where the soil is rich and conditions favorable. The tobacco industry has perhaps more possibilities, and might be made a close rival to that in Cuba. But the hemp crop is limited by the world's needs, and as those needs are just so much each year, there is no object in increas- ing a supply which up to date has been adequate. There are foreigners in the Philippines, who have been there for years, who have controlled the exports INTRODUCTION XVU of sugar or hemp or tobacco, who have made their living, and who from having been longer on the ground should be the first to improve the oppor- tunities that may come with the downfall of Spanish rule. There are some things which the United States can send to the Philippines cheaper than the Conti- nental manufacturers, but not many. She can send flour and some kinds of machinery, she can put in electric plants, she can build railways, but at present she can't produce the cheap implements, and the nec- essaries required by the great bulk of poor natives at the low price which England and Germany can. The Philippines are not an El Dorado simply be- cause for the first time they have been brought to our notice. They should not yield more than the ordi- nary return to labor, and the question is, does the average American want to live in a distant land, cut off from friends and a civilized climate, only to get the ordinary return for his efforts? To which, even though of coui'se there is much to be said on the other side, I would answer, No. We have gone to war, remembering the Maine, to free Cuba, and at the first blow have taken another group of islands — a Cuba in the East — to deal with. I have not the space here to discuss the solution of the problem, but, for my part, I should like to see England interest- ed in buying back an archipelago which she formerly 5VU1 IKTEOD0CTION held for ransom, leaving us perhaps a coaling port, and opening up the country to such as chose to go there. Then, with someone else to shoulder the burden of government and protection, we shoidd still have all the opportunities for proving whether or not the islands were the El Dorado dreamed of in our clubs or counting-rooms. At the close of 1893, 1 went to Manila for Messrs. Henry W. Peabody & Co., of Boston and New York, in the interest of -their hemp business, and, associated with Mr. A. H. Eand, remained there for two years. We two were the representatives of the only Ameri- can house doing business in the Philippines, and made up practically fifty per cent, of the American business colony in Manila. The years from 1894 to 1896 were peculiarly peaceful with the quiet coming before the storm, and we were fortunate enough to be able to make many excursions and go into many parts of the island that later would have been dan- gerous. But as the short term of our service drew to a close, rumors of trouble began to circulate. The natives had long suffered from the demands made by the Church and the tax-gatherer, and there was a feeling that they might again attempt to throw off the Spanish yoke, as they attempted, without success, some years before. It was at this period that Messrs. Peabody & Co. decided it would be to their unques- INTRODUCTION XIX tionable advantage to retire from the islands and to place their business in the hands of an English firm, long established on the ground, and well equipped with men who, unlike ourselves, looked forward to passing the rest of their days in the Philippines. And the move was a good one, for no sooner had we left Manila than revolution broke out. The Spanish troops were at the south, and that mysterious native brotherhood of the Katipunan called its members to attack the capital. A massacre was planned, but the right leaders were lacking and the attempt failed. The troops were recalled, guards doubled, draw- bridges into old Manila pulled up nightly, arrests and executions made. As is well known, one hun- dred suspects vrere crowded into that old dungeon on the river, just at the corner of the city wall, and be- cause it came on to rain at night-fall, an officer shut do^vn the trap-door leading to the prisoners' cells to keep out the water. But it also kept out the air, and next morning sixty out of the one hundred per- sons were suffocated. Then Manila had her Black Hole. Later, other suspects were stood on the curb- ing that surrounds the Luneta and were shot down while the big artillery band discoursed patriotic music to the crowds that thronged the promenade. And from then until Admiral Dewey silenced the guns at Oavite and sunk the Spanish ships that used to swing XX INTEODUCTION peacefully at anchor oif the breakwater, the Span- iards had their hands full with a revolution brought on by their own rotten system of government. If in place of the more systematic nan-atives of description, the more serious presentations of sta- tistics, or the more exciting accounts of the bloody months of the revolution and the wonderful victory of our gallant fleet, which are to be looked for from other sources, the reader cares to get some idea of casual life in Manila, by accepting the rather collo- quial chronicle of an ex-resident that follows, I shall have made some little return to islands that robbed me of little else than two years of a more hurried existence in State Street or Broadway. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES Leaving" God's Country *'— Hong Kong— Crossing to Luzon— Manila Bay— First View of the City— Eartliqualce Precautions— Balco- nies and Window-Gratings — The River Pasig — Promenade of the Malecon— The Old City — The Puente de Espana — Population — A Philippine Bed — The English Club — The Luneta — A Christinas Dinner at the Club. "I wouldn't give much for your chances of coming back unboxed," said the Captain to me, as the China steamed out from the Golden Gate on the twenty-five day voyage to Hong Kong via Honolulu and Yoko- hama. " That's God's country we're leaving behind, sure enough," said he, " and you'll find it out after a week or two in the Philippines. There's Howe came back with us last trip from there ; almost shuffled ofif on the way. Spent half a year in Manila with smallpox, fever, snakes, typhoons, and earthquakes, and had to be carried aboard ship at Hong Kong and off at 'Frisco. Guess he's about done for all right." And as Howe happened to be the unfortunate 2 YESTERDAYS IK THE PHILIPPINES whose place in Manila I was going to take, you know, I heeded the skipper's advice and looked with more fervor on God's country than I had for some days. For it was a dusty trip across country from Boston on the Pacific express ; and because babies are my pet aversion every mother's son of them aboard the train was quartered in my car — three families moving West to grow up with the country, and all of them occupy- ing the three sections nearest mine. I got so weary of the five cooing, coughing, crying " clouds-of -glory- trailers," that it seemed a relief at San Francisco to wash off the dust of the Middle West and get aboard the P. M. S. Company's steamer China bound for the far East. But the Captain, hke the whistle, was somewhat of a blower, and liked to make me and the missionaries aboard feel we were leaving behind all that was de- sirable. And how he bothered the twoscore or more of them bound for the up-river ports of Middle China ! When, after leaving the Sandwich Islands, the voyage had proceeded far enough for everybody on the passenger-list to get fairly well acquainted with his neighbors, these spreaders of the gospel fol- lowed the custom established by their predecessors and made plans for a Simday missionary service. Without so much as asking leave of the skipper, they posted in the companion-way the following notice : YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES Service in the Saloon, Sunday, 10 A.M. Rev. X. Y. Z. Smith, of Wang- kiang, China, will speak on mission work on the Upper Yangtse, All are invited. But they counted without their host. The Cap- tain had never schooled himself to look on mission- aries with favor, and he accordingly made arrange- ments to cross the meridian where the circle of time changes and a day is dropped early on Sunday morning. He calculated to a nicety, and as the pas- sengers came down to Sabbath breakfast they saw posted below the other notice, in big letters, the significant words : Sunday, Nov. 29th. Sh p crosses 180th meridian 9.30 A.M.y After which It will be Monday. 4 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES In Yokohama and Hong Kong the wiseacres were free in saying they wouldn't be found dead in Ma- nila or the Philippines for anything. They had never been there, but knew all about it, and seemed ready to wave any one bound thither a sort of never'11-see-you-again farewell that was most affect- ing. It is these very people that have made Manila the side-tracked capital that it is and have scared off globe-trotters from making it a visit on their way to the Straits of Malacca and India. Hong Kong, the end of the China's outward run, bursts into view after a narrow gateway, between inhospitable cliffs, lets the steamer into a great bay which is the centre of admiration for bleak mountain- ranges. The city, with its epidemic of arcaded bal- conies, lies along the water to the left and goes step- ping up the steep slopes to the peak behind, on whose summit the signal-flags announce our araval. The China has scarcely a chance to come to an- chor in peace before a storm of sampans bite her sides like mosquitoes, and hundreds of Chinawomen come hustling up to secure your trade, while their lazy husbands stay below and smoke. Hong Kong rather feels as if it were the " central exchange " for the Far East, and from the looks of things I judge it is. The great bay is fuU of deep- water ships, the quays teem with life, and the streets YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES O are full of quiet bustle. It is quite enough to give one heart disease to shin up the hills to the res- idence part of the town, and it took me some time to find breath enough to tell the Spanish Consul I wanted him to vise my passport to Manila. This interesting stronghold of Old England in the East is fertile in descriptive matter by the whole- sale, but I can't rob my friends in the Philippines of more space than enough to chronicle the doings of a Chinese tailor who made me uj) my first suit of thin tweeds. Eipping off the broad margin to the Hong Kong Daily Press, he stood me on a box, took my measure with his strip of paper, making sundry little tears along its length, according as it represented length of sleeve or breadth of chest, and sent me off with a placid "Me makee allee same plopper tree day ; no fittee no takee." And I'm bound to say that the thin suits Tak Oheong built for $6 apiece, from nothing but the piece of paper full of tears, fit to far greater perfection than the system of measurement would seem to have warranted. The voyage from Hong Kong to Manila, 700 miles to the southeast, is one of the worst short ocean-crossings in existence, and the Esmeralda, Captain Tayler, as she went aslant the seas rolling down from Japan, in front of the northeast mon- soon, developed such a corkscrew motion that I 6 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES fear it will take a return trip against the other monsoon to untwist the feelings of her passengers. On the morning of the second day, however, the yawing ceased ; the skipper said we were imder the lee of Luzon, the largest and most northern island of the Philippines, and not long after the high moun- tains of the shore -range loomed up off the port bow. From then on our chunky craft of 1,000 tons steamed closer to the coast and turned headland after headland as she poked south through schools of fly- ing-fish and porpoises. By afternoon the light-house onCorregidor appeared, and with a big sweep to the left the Esmeralda entered the Boca Chica, or narrow mouth to Manila Bay. On the left, the coast mountains sloped steeply up for some 5,000 feet, while on the right the island of Corregidor, with its more moderate altitude, stood planted in the twelve-mile opening to worry the tides that swept in and out from the China Sea. Beyond lay the Boca Grande, or wide mouth used by ships coming from the south or going thither, and still beyond again rose the lower mountains of the south coast. In front the Bay opened with a grand sweep right and left, till the shore was lost in waves of warm air, and only the dim blue of distant mountains showed where the opposite perimeter of the great circle might be located. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 7 It was twenty-seven miles across the bay, and the sun had set with a wealth of color in the opening behind us before we came to anchor amid a fleet of ships and steamers off a low-lying shore that showed many lights in long rows. Next morning Manila lay visibly before us, but failed to convey much idea of its size, from the fact that it stretched far back on the low land, thus permitting the eye to see only the front line of buildings and a few taller and more distant church-steeples. Not far in the background rose a high range of velvet-like looking mountains whose tops aspired to show themselves above the clouds, and on the right and left stretched flanking ranges of lower altitude. In due season my colleague came off to the anchor- age in a small launch, and we were soon steaming back up a narrow river thickly fringed with small ships, steamers, houses, quays, and people. It was piping hot at the low custom-house on the quay. Panting carabao — ^the oxen of the East — tried to find shade under a parcel of bamboos, shaggy goats nosed about for stray bits of crude sugar dropped from bags being discharged by coolies, piles of machinery were lying around promiscuously dumped into the deep mud of the outyards, natives with bared backs gleam- ing in the sun were lugging hemp or prying open boxes, and under-ofScials with sharp rods were probing 8 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES flour-sacks in the search for contraband. Spanish officials in full uniform, smoking cigarettes, playing chess, and fanning themselves in their comfortable seats in bent-wood rocking-chairs, were interrupted by our arrival, and made one boil within as they upset the baggage and searched for smuggled dollars. Here, then, was the anti-climax to the long jom-ney of forty days from Boston, and those were the moments in which to reahze the meaning of the expression made by the Captain of the Chiua as she left the Golden Gate : " Take a last look, for you're leaving behind God's country." Before arrival, while yet the Esmeralda was steam- ing down the coast, I was resolved to refrain from judging Manila by first impressions. I felt primed for anything, and was bound to be neither surprised nor disappointed. At first, I may admit, my chin and collar drooped, but on meeting with my new asso- ciate I gave them a mental starching and stepped with courage into the rickety barouche that, drawn by two small and bony ponies, toot us to the office of Henry W. Peabody & Co., the only American house in the Philippines. And having entered the two upstair rooms, that looked out over the little Plaza de Cervantes, I was in- troduced to bamboo chairs, a quartette of desks, and half a dozen office-boys, who were rudely awakened bo 2 O o YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 9 from their morning's slumber by the scuffle of my heavy boots on the broad, black planks of the shining floors. Across the larger room, suspended from the ceiling, hung the big " punka," which seems to form a most important article of furniture in every tropical establishment. On my amval the boy who pulled the string got down to work, and amid the sea-breezes that blew the morning's mail about, business of the day began. The first thing I noticed was that cloth instead of plaster formed the walls and ceilings, and seemed far less likely than the mixture of lime and water to fall into baby's crib or onto the dinner-table during those terrestrial or celestial exhibitions for which Manila is famous. For the Philippines are said to be the cradle of earthquake and typhoon, and in buildings, everywhere, construction seems to conform to the requirements of these much - respected "movers." Tiles on roofs, they say, are now forbidden, since the passers-by below are not willing to wear brass hel- mets or carry steel umbrellas to ward off a shower of those missiles started by a heavy shake. Galvanized iron is used instead, and, whUe detracting from the picturesque, has added to the security of households who once used to be rudely awakened from their slumbers by the extra weight of tile bedspreads. And Manila houses. Down in the town, outside 10 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPIJSfES the city walls, tlie regular, or rather irregular, Spanish type prevails, and nature, in her nervousness, seems to have done much in dispensing with lines horizontal and perpendicular. The buildings all have an ap- pearance of feebleness and senility, and look as if a good blow or a heavy shake would lay them flat. But in the old city, behind the fortifications, are heavy buttressed braidings of by-gone days, buUt when it was thought that earthquakes respected thick walls rather than thin, and the sturdy buttresses so occupy the narrow sidewalks that pedestrians must travel single file. The Spanish — so it seems — rejoice to huddle together in these gloomy houses of Manila proper, but the rich natives, half-castes, and foreigners all prefer the newer villas outside the narrow streets and musty walls ; and just as much as the Anglo-Saxon likes to place a grass-plot or a garden between him and the thoroughfare in front of his residence, so does the Spaniard seek to hug close to the street, and even builds his house to overhang the sidewalk. Save for carriages and dogs, the lower floors of city houses are generally deserted, and, on account of fevers that hang about in the mists of the low-ground, everyone takes to living on the upper story. Balconies, which are so elaborate that they carry the whole upper part of the house out over the sidewalk, are a conspicuous feature in all the buildings of older construction, and TESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES 11 with their engaging overhang afford opportunities for leaning out to talk with passers-by below, or a con- venient vantage-ground from which to throw the waste water from wash-basins. Huge window-gratings thrust themselves forward from the walls of the lower story, and are often big enough to permit dogs and servants to sit in them and watch the pedestrians, who almost have to leave the sidewalk to get around these great cages. It may be just as well, before going farther, to say something about this town that is sarcastically labelled "Pearl of the Orient" and "Venice of the Far East" by poets who have only seen the oyster-shell windows or back doors on the Pasig on the cover-labels of cigar-boxes. It seems big enough to supply me with the pianos and provisions which kind friends sug- gested I bring out with me in case of need, and the main street, Escolta, is as busy with life and as well fringed with shops as a Washington street or a Broadway. Spanish, of course, is the court and commercial lan- guage and, except among the uneducated natives who have a lingo of their own or among the few members of the Anglo-Saxon colony — it has a monopoly every- where. No one can really get on without it, and even the Chinese come in with their peculiar pidgin variety. The city squats around its old friend the river 12 TESTEKDATS IN THE PHILIPPIKE8 Pasig, and shakes hands with itself in the several bridges that bind one side to the other. On the right bank of the river, coming in from the bay and passing up by the breakwater, lies the old walled town of Manila proper, whose weedy moats, ponderous draw- bridges, and heavy gates suggest a troubled past. Old Manila may be figured as a triangle, a mile on a side, and the dingy walls seem, as it were, to herd in a drove of church-steeples, schools, houses, and streets. The river is the boundary on the north, and the wall at that side but takes up the quay which runs in from the breakwater and carries it up to the Puente de Espana, the first bridge that has courage enough to span the yellow stream. The front wall runs a mile to the south along the bay front, starting at the river in the old fort and bat- tery that look down on the berth where the Esme- ralda lies, and is separated from the beach only by an old moat and the promenade of the Malecon, which, also beginning at the river, runs to an open plaza called the Luneta, a mile up the beach. The east wall takes up the business at that point, and wobbles off at an angle again till it brings up at the river for- tifications, just near where the Puente de Espafia, al- ready spoken of, carries all the traffic across the Pasig. Thus the old city is cooped up like pool-balls, in a tri- angle three miles around, and the walls do as much in YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 13 keeping out the wind as they do in keeping in the various unsavory odors that come from people who like garlic and don't take baths. Here is the cathe- dral — a fine old church that cost a million of money and was widowed of its steeple in the earthquakes of the '80s — and besides a lot of smaller chiu:ches are convent schools, the city hall, army barracks, and a raft of private residences. Opposite Old Manila, on the other bank, lies the business section, with the big quays lined with steam- ers and alive with movement. The custom-house and the foreign business community are close by the river-side, while in back are hundi-eds of narrow streets, storehouses, and shops that go to make up the stamping ground of the Chinese who control so large a part of the provincial trade. Everything centres at the foot of the Puente de Espana, which pours its perspiring flood into the nar- row lane of the Escolta, and people, carriages, tram- cars, and dust all sail in here from north, east, south, and west. As on the other side, the busy part of the section runs a mile up and down the river and a mile back from it, while out or up beyond come the earlier residential suburbs. In Old Manila, the Cluu-ch seems to rule, but on this side the Pasig the State makes itself felt, from the custom-house to the governor's palace — a couple of miles up stream. 14 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES As to population, Manila, in the larger sense, may hold 350,000 souls, besides a few dogs. Of the lot, call 50,000 Chinese, 5,000 Spaniards, 150 Germans, 90 English, and 4 Americans. The rest are natives or half-castes of the Malay type, whose blood runs in all mixtures of Chinese, Spanish, and what-not propor- tions, and whose Chinese eyes, flat noses, and high cheek-bones are queer accompaniments to their Span- ish accents. Thus the majority of the souls in Manila — like the dogs — are mongrels, or mestizos, as the word is, and the saying goes that happy is the man who knows his own father. I spent my first night in Manila at the Spanish Hotel El Oriente, and it was here that I became acquainted with that peculiar institution, the Philip- pine bed. And to the newly arrived traveller its peculiar rig and construction make it command a good deal of interest, if not respect. It is a four- poster, with the posts extending high enough to sup- port a light roof, from whose eaves hang copious folds of deep lace. The bed-frame is strung tightly across with regular chair-bottom cane, and the only other fittings are a piece of straw matting spread over the cane, a pillow, and a surrounding wall of mosquito- netting that drops down from the roof and is tucked in under the matting. How to get into one of these cages was the first question that presented itself, and bo O YESTEKDAYS IN" THE PHILIPPINES 15 what to do with myself after I got in was the second. It took at least half an hour to make up my mind as to the proper mode of entrance, when I was for the first time alone with this Philippine curiosity, and I couldn't make out whether it was proper to get in through the roof or the bottom or the side. After finally pulling away the netting, I found the hard cane bottom about as soft as the teak floor, and looked in Yain for blankets, sheets, and mattresses. In fact, it seems as if I had gotten into an unfurnished house, and the more I thought about it the longer I stayed awake. At last I cut my way out of the peculiar arrangement, dressed, and spent the decidedly cool night in a long cane chair, preferring not to experi- ment further with the sleeping-machine until I found out how it worked. Next morning my breakfast was brought up by a native boy, and consisted of a cup of thick chocolate, a clammy roll, and a sort of seed-cake without any hole in it. How to drink the chocolate, which was as thick as molasses, seemed the chief question, but I rightly concluded that the seed-cake was put there to sop it out of the cup, after the fashion of blotting- paper. Fortified with this peculiar combination, I started on my second business day by trying to re- member in what direction the office lay, and wandered cityward through busy streets, often bordered with 16 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES arcaded sidewalks, which were further shaded from the sun by canvas curtains. After beginning the morning by ordering a dozen suits of white sheeting from a native tailor — price $2.50 apiece — I was- introduced to the members of the English Club, and began to feel more at home stretched out in one of the long chairs in the cool library. It seems that the club affords shelter and refreshment to its fourscore members at two widely separated points of the compass, one just on the banks of the Pasig River, where its waters, slouching down from the big lake at the foot of the mountains, are first introduced to the outlying suburbs of the city, and the other in the heart of the business section. The same set of native servants do for both depart- ments, since no one stays uptown during the middle of the day and no one downtown after business hours. As a result, on week-days, after the light breakfast of the early morning is over at the uptown building, the staff of waiters and assistants hurry downtown in the tram-cars and make ready for the noon meal at the other structure, returning home to the subui'bs in time to officiate at dinner. At the downtown club is the 6,000-volume library, and after the noonday tiffin it is always customary to stretch out in one of the long bamboo chairs and read one's self to sleep. This is indeed a land where lazi- YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 17 ness becomes second nature. If you want a book or paper on the table, and they lie more than a yard or two from where you are located, it is not policy to reach for them. O, no ! You ring a bell twice as far off, take a nap while the boy comes from a distance, and wake up to find him handing you them with a graceful " Aqui, Senor ! " In fact, I have even just now met an English fellow who, they teU me, took a barber with him on a recent trip to the southern provinces, to look after his scanty beard that was composed of no more than three or four dozen hairs, each of which grew one-eighth of an inch quarterly. On the day before Christmas one of the guest-rooms at the uptown club was vacated, and I moved in. The building is about two and a half miles out of the city, and its broad balcony, shaded by luxuriant palms and other tropical trees, almost overhangs the main river that splits Manila in twos The view from this tropical piazza is most peaceful. Opposite lie the rice-fields, with a cluster of native huts surrounding an old church, while, blue in the distance, sleeps a range of low mountains. To the left the river winds back up- country and soon loses itself in many turns among the foothills that later grow into the more adult uplifts on the Pacific Coast, while to the right it turns a sharp corner and slides down between broken rows of native huts and more elaborate bungtilows. 2 18 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES The club-house is long, low, and rambling. The reading, writing, and music rooms front on the river, and the glossy hard-wood floors, hand-hewn out of solid trees, seem to suggest music and coolness. It is possible to reach the city by jumping into a native boat at the portico on the river bank, or to go by one of the two-wheel gigs, called carromatas, waiting at the front gate, or to walk a block and take the tram-car which jogs down through the busy high- road. It is very difficult to absorb the points of so large a place at one's first introduction, so I won't go fur- ther now than to speak of that far-famed seaside promenade called the Limeta, where society takes its airing after the heat of the day is over. Imagine an elliptical plaza, about a thousand feet long, situated just above the low beach which borders the Bay, and looking over toward the China Sea. Run- ning around its edge is a broad roadway, bounded on one side by the sea^-wall, and on the other by the green fields and bamboo-trees of the parade-gi'ounds. In the centre of the raised ellipse is the band-stand, and on every afternoon, from six to eight, all Manila come here to feel the breeze, hear the music, and see their neighbors. Hundreds of carriages line the roadways, and mounted police keep them in proper file. The movement is from right to left, and only YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 19 the Archbishop and the Governor-Geueral are allowed to drive in the opposite direction. The gentler element, in order not to encourage a flow of perspiration that may melt off their complex- ions, take to carriages, but the sterner sex prefer to walk up and down, crowd around the band-stand, or sit along the edge of the curbing in chairs rented for a couple of coppers. Directly in front lies the great Bay, with the sun going down in the Boca Chica, between the hardly visible island of Oorregidor and the main land, thirty miles away. To the rear stretches the parade-ground, backed up by clumps of bamboos and the distant mountains beyond. To the right lie the corner batteries and walls of Old Manila, and to the left the attractive suburb of Ermita, with the stretch of shore running along toward the naval station of Cavite, eleven miles away. To take a chair, watch the people walking to and fro, and see the endless stream of smart turn-outs passing in slow procession ; to hear a band of fifty pieces render popular and classic music with the spirit of a Sousa or a Beeves, is to doubt that you are in a capital 8,000 miles from Paris and 11,000 miles from New York. Footmen with tail hats, in spotless white uniforms, grace the box-seats of the low-built victorias, while tastefully dressed Spanish women or wealthy half-castes recline against the soft cushions and take 20 TESTERDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES for granted the admiration of those walking up and down the mall. The splendidly trained artiUery-band, composed entirely of natives, but conducted by a Spaniard, plays half a dozen selections each evening, and here is a treat that one can have every afternoon of the year, free of charge. There are no snow-drifts or cold winds to mar the performance, and, except during the showers and winds of the rainy season, it goes on without interruption. After the music is over the carriages rush ofif in every direction, behind smart-stepping little ponies that get over the ground at a tremendous pace, and the dinner-hour is late enough not to rob one of those pleasant hours at just about simset. There are no horses in Manila — all ponies, and some of them are so smaU as to be actually insignificant. They are tremendously tough little beasts, however, and stand more heat, work, and beating than most horses of twice their size. Our Christmas dinner at the club has just ended, and from the bill of fare one would never suspect he was not at the Waldorf or the Parker House. Long punkas swung to and fro over the big tables, small serving boys in bare feet rushed hither and thither with meat and drink, corks popped, the smart breeze blew jokes about, and everyone unbent. 1 O o u o a. < YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 99 descent, thougli he comes from Ireland, and looks sometliing like one of our distinguished Boston statesmen. They both climb up the stairs to our counting-room daily, call our big clock a " time de- stroyer " and so -vie with each other in their efforts to handle the truth carelessly that it is often a ques- tion who comes off victor in these verbal contests. However, the skipper with the false ivories generally fails to get the last word, for he often loses his suc- tion power by fast talking, and has to leave off to prevent his teeth from slipping down his oesoph- agus. Once again the air in the office assumes a nautical aroma, and we shall be well employed and well talked to death. A whole parcel of American ships are now about due, and the Bay will hven up again with the Stars and Stripes as it did some two months ago. It rains every afternoon now, at about a quarter past three, and just after tiffin is over we begin to look for the thunder-clouds that predict the coming shower. The other day a huge waterspout formed out in the Bay, swirled along, gyrated about, scooted squarely through the shipping, and broke on the beach between our house and the Luneta. The cloud effects were extremely curious, and the whole display was a num- ber not generally down on the day's programme. The company who are putting in the new electric 100 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES lights seem to be doing good work, and it is expected that everything will be running by the end of the year. So far, Manila has been favored only with the dull light given by petroleum, previously brought out from New York, or over from China, and, curiously enough, the empty tins in which the oil has come seem to be almost as valuable as their contents. They are used here for about everything under the sun, the natives cover their roofs with tin from these sources, and some of those more musically inclined even make a petroleum can up into a trombone or comet. Our house by the sea continues to prove very pleas- ant, and, peculiarly enough, the surf seems to beat on the beach with the same sound that it has on the New England coast. The southwest breeze blows strong from the Bay each afternoon, and the cumulus clouds are becoming heavier and more numerous day by day. The artillery-band stiU favors us with music at the Luneta, but before long it looks as if the rains would interrupt the afternoon promenade. The black plague at Hong Kong does not seem to diminish, as was expected, and it is said that many people are leaving the city. AU steamers coming from that port to this suffer a fortnight's quarantine down the Bay, and, if the difficulty continues much longer, Manila markets will be destitute of two of their chief staples — mutton and potatoes — both of YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 101 which have to come across from China, or down from Japan. And speaking of sheep, Captain Tayler, of the Esmeralda, has had another of his usual inter- esting experiences with the custom-house. Just as his vessel, fresh from quarantine and Hong Kong, had been visited by the doctor, on her way to her berth some distance up the river, one of the sheep died. Bule number something-or-other in the Code of the Sanidad says that anything or anybody dying during the day must be buried before sundown, under penalty, for neglect, of $50. Eule number something-else in the Customs Code, however, says that the captain of any vessel turning out cargo short or in excess of the amount called for by the manifest shall be fined $100 for each piece too many or too little. If my good friend, the Captain, buried the sheep, he would be fined $100 at the cus- tom-house for short out-turn. If he didn't bury it, the Board of Health would come down on him for $50, for neglecting regulations. The Captain, being a wise man, decided that it was more politic to be in the right with the doctor than with the officials at the custom-house, and at some considerable ex- pense sent the sheep on shore and had it buried with due honors. He could not have thrown it into the river, for this would have been to incur an addi- tional fine. Next morning, he presented the ship's 102 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES manifest and a sheep's tail at the custom-house and the discharge of the live stock was begun. But, tail or no tail, the officials found the ship one sheep short and the Esmeralda was fined $100. Not quite so barefaced as the swindling of the poor skipper who came over from China with a load of paving- stones for Manila's Street Department. His vessel turned out seven paving-stones too many, and the fine was $700. In the language of Daniel Webster, I " refrain from saying " that a few dollars or a good dinner, bestowed upon the right person, in Manila, often go a long way toward throwing some official off the scent in his himgry search for ii-regularity, but am willing to admit that, in dealing with customs men who frequently " examine " cases of champagne by drinking up the contents of a bottle from each one in order to see that the liquid is not chloroform or cologne, one must keep his purse full, his talk cool, and his temper on ice. June 35, 1894. Last Monday was the monthly bank-holiday again, and three of us had previously decided to take a jour- ney southward for the purpose of seeing one of Luzon's active volcanoes and getting a little change of air and "chow." So, late on Saturday afternoon, we went aboard a YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 103 dirty little steamer, which was to take us ninety miles down the coast. She wasn't as big as a good-sized tug and was laden with multicolored natives, who were on their way back to the provinces after a brief shopping expedition to the capital. We were soon sailing out past the fleet of larger vessels in the Bay, with our dull prow pointed to the mouth of the great inclosed body of water. At nightfall we reached the Corregidor light-house, at the Bay's en- trance, and thence our course lay to the south. At half-past two that night our craft reached a place called Taal. During our trip down we had become acquainted with a very pleasant Indian sugar-plant- er, who is as well off in dollars as rich in hospitality. At Taal he took us to one of the three big houses he owns, and, although only three o'clock in the morning, gave us a delicious breakfast. We talked and chatted away comfortably, and as the first streaks of dawn appeared I played several appropriate se- lections on one of the two very good-toned pianos belonging to his establishment. Tliis brought out his family, and before we set out for the river from which our start to the volcano was to be made, quite a social gathering was in progress. The natives all through the islands seemed indeed most courteous and hospitable to foreigners, and although a Spaniard hesitates to show his face out- 104 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES side of any of the garrison towns, yet any of the other European bipeds is known in a minute and well treated. Our good friend at Taal went so far as to harness up a pair of ponies and drive us down to the river at four o'clock in the morning, and we found a large banca, previously ordered, waiting to take us up to the Lake of Taal and across to the volcano. Our banca was of good size, was rowed by seven men and steered by one, and had a little thatched hen-coop arrangement over the stern, to keep the Sim off our heads. We had brought one " boy " with us from Manila, with enough " chow " to last for two days, and soon aU was stowed away in our floating tree-tiTink. The river was shallow, and for most of the six miles of its length poles were the motive- power. It was slow work, and both wind and current were hostile. In due course, however, the lake came into view, and in its centre rose the volcano, smoking away like a true Filipino. The wind was now blowing strong and unfavorable, and we saw that it was not going to be an easy row across the six. or seven miles of open water to the centre island. But the men worked with a will, and although the choppy waves slopped over into our roost once or twice so jocosely that it almost seemed as if we should have to turn back, we kept on. Benefitting by a lull or two, our progress was gradual, and at half after twelve, YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 105 seven hours from Taal, we landed on tlie volcanic island and prepared for an ascent. The lake of Taal is from fifteen to twenty miles across, is surrounded by high hiUs and mountains, for the most part, and has for its centre the volcanic island upon whose edges rise the sloping sides of an active cone a thousand feet high. The lake is cer- tainly good to look at, reminding one forcibly of Loch Lomond, and the waters, shores, and moun- tains around all seem to bend their admiring gaze on the little volcano in its centre. Filling our water-jug, we set off up the barren lava- slopes of this nature's safety-valve, sweltering under the stiff climb in the hot sun. Happily, the view bet- tered each moment, the smell of the sulphur became stronger, and we forgot present discomfort in anticipa- tions of the revelation to come. After banging our shins on the particularly rough lava-beds of the as- cent, near the top, we saw a great steaming crater yawning below us and sending up clouds of sulphur- ous steam. In the centre of this vast, dreary Circus Maximus rose a flat cone of red-hot squashy material, and out of it ascended the steam and smoke. All colors of the rainbow played with each other in the sun, and farther to the right was a boiling lake of fiery material that was variegated enough to suit an Italian organ-grinder. 106 TESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES It was all very weird, and if we had not been so lazy we should probably have descended farther into this laboratory of fire than we did. But it was too hot to make matches of ourselves and the air smelt like the river Styx at low tide. So we were con- tented with a good view of the wonders of the vol- cano from a distance, enjoyed the panorama from the narrow encircling apex-ridge, and cooled off in the smart breeze. Once more at the lake, and it was not long before we were in it, tickling our feet on the rough cinders of the bottom. The bath was most rejuvenating after a hot midday climb, and just to sit in the warmish water up to one's neck gave one a sort of mellow feeling like that presum- ably possessed by a ripe apple ready to fall on the grass. The wind was now fresher than ever and more un- favorable to our course. The captain of the tree- trunk, in a tone quite as authoritative as that manip- ulated by the commander of an ocean liner, said we could not proceed for some time, so the boy arranged the provisions and we had a meal in our little hen- coop. After a provoking wait until four o'clock the old banca was pushed off again and the struggle re- newed. The seven men, who had now been poling and rowing since early morning, seemed pretty well beat, but there was no shelter on the volcanic islands YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 107 and we had to push on. The other shore looked far away and we slopped forward sluggishly. The sun set, the moon rose, and still we were buffeting with the choppy waves. It remiaded me a good deal of the sea of Galilee ; and it did seem as i£ the dickens himself was blowing at us and trying to keep us from ever getting to that farther shore. At last we reached the lee of a lofty perpendicular island part way across the lake, and, although its upright sides offered no chance to land, yet they kept off that southeast wind. The men shut their teeth hard, and in due course moved our bark around the point and out into more moonlight and breeze. The lights and shadows on the great lump of rock standing a thousand feet out of the water behind us were worth looking at, and in many places huge basaltic columns seemed to be holding up the mass above. Not to put as much labor into these lines as our men put into the oars, at half after ten we came to land, seven hours from the shore of the volcano, a dis- tance which in fair wind ought to be covered in a lit- tle over one. On shore there seemed to be about four huts, two pig-sties, and nothing more. Stared at by a crowd of natives whom our arrival suddenly incubated from somewhere, and who swarmed down to see who we were, we talked with our boatman, but only succeeded 108 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES in finding out that we had come to a place not down on the map or on the highroad to the next Tillage whither we were bound. It was simply a collection of huts, children, and pigs, situated at the lake's edge and connected with the outer world by a foot-path that led up over the hills eight miles to the nearest pueblo. To walk those eight miles at eleven o'clock was out of the question, and to sleep in one of those little dirty huts ashore was just as bad. The crowd of natives had grown, and so, to avoid being over- run with the eminently curious, we pushed off from shore and anchored out in the lake, to eat a little " chow " and decide what to do. Weariness tempered our decision, which was to sleep where we were, in the banca, under the hen-coop, and, having made it known to our trusty but hard-looking crew, they fell down like shots and, in less than a minute, were asleep in all sorts of jackstraw positions. One slept on the oars, another on the poles, a third on our collec- tion of volcanic rocks, a fourth in the bottom of the boat, a fifth sitting up, and a sixth — I don't know where. We three lay do^vn side by side in the little cooped- over roost, and found there was just room to reside like sardines in a box. Our feet were out under the stars at one side, our heads at the other, and there we were, and there we slept, in an unknown wilderness. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 109 Thougli no one could change his position yre all rested fairly well, and nothing happened to mar the beauty of the night. As the suu reddened the east, feeling more like awakened chickens than anything else, we packed up, paid out some of the heavy dollars, that made each of us feel like sinkers on a fish-line, and loaded what little luggage we had upon a bony pony ashore. Adieus were said to the lake and to our crew, and our little caravan started up a broad foot-path for the village of Tanauan, about eight miles away. It was a long walk, on no refreshment save a night's sleep in a hen-coop, but after passing over hills and dales, by nipa huts of all sizes and descriptions, and after being stared at by curious natives, we arrived at our destination, a good-sized village, in two and a half hours. We responded to an invitation of the captain of the pueblo, to take possession of his house, and got up a very decent breakfast out of our fast depleting stock. The old captain treated us most cordially, and after a three-hours' stay helped us to load ourselves and our chattels aboard two stout- wheeled, carromatas each hitched to two ponies. Off again, once more, our course was shaped over- land toward the other great lake up back of Manila, by which the return was to be made. The road was fearful, the ruts two feet deep in places, and the bad sections far more numerous than the good pieces. 110 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES We got stuck in the mud, had to pry our conveyances and the ponies out, and I fear did not enjoy the beau- ties of the rather tame scenery on the way. At last the crest of a hill brought the Laguna de Bay in sight, and in less than an hour we reached the village of Calamba, on its shores. A shabby little native house Avas put at our disposal after we boldly walked up and took possession of it ; a swarm of children were shoved out of the one decent room, and in a short time our boy was giving us canned turtle-soup and herrings. In the afternoon we merely lounged about the town and took a swim in the lake, while in the evening, early after the very good little dinner got- ten up by our servant there was nothing to do but to turn in, even though the house was surrounded by the curious, who had looked in at the windows to watch people dining with knives, forks, plates, and napkins. The floor of our room was of bamboo slats, just below whose many openings were four fighting-cocks and when bed-time came we were tired enough to tumble down on the canes just as we stood. The cock who sang out of tune woke us at about siinrise Tuesday morning, and after one more swim in the lake we packed up our traps and prepared ourselves to take the little Manila steamer that left at eight o'clock on its thirty-mile return trip. The sail down the lake and into the Pasig Eiver was cool, delightful, YESTEEDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 111 and without incident, and at noon Tuesday we pulled up at the wharf at Manila, having completed an almost perfect circle of travel one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, to be heartily congratulated on having successfully made a trip which few per- form but many covet. My own cane sleeping ma- chine seemed good again after hen-coops and bamboo floors, and smooth roads and civilization far better than ruts and rickety carromatas. VI First Storm of the Rainy Season— Fourth of July— Chinese " Chow " Dogs— Crullers and Pie and a Chinese Cook — A Red-Letter Day — ^The China- Japan War — Manila Newspapers— General Blanco and the Archbishop — An American Fire-Engine and its Lively Trial — The Coming of the Typhoon — Violence of the Wind — The Floods Next — Manila Monotony. July 4th. The mails have been badly snarled up lately, and althoiigb nobody has received any letters for nearly two weeks, none are expected for about ten days. The other morning began the first real storm of the rainy season, and we came very near having a bad typhoon, but someone turned the switch, and it swirled up the back coast on the Pacific side and crossed through a notch in the mountains, some distance to the north of Manila, giving the city only four days of monstrous winds and floods of rain. The streets were two feet deep with water in the business section, and down at our house by the sea the wind blew so hard that it carried the tin from our roof off to visit the next suburb. Then it was that those sturdy windows of small sea-shells set into hardwood lattice seemed far more secure than glass, and I 113 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 113 doubt if anything less well constructed would have stood the blast that surged in from the broad bay. Going down-town in the morning, my carriage was slid clean across the road by the force of the wind, and once it seemed as if I might be lifted up into the low clouds that scudded close to the tops of the bamboo-trees. Huge seas came tumbling ashore on the beach, and the vessels in the great exposed Bay had all they could do to hang to their anchors, as the surf sometimes dashed as high as their lower foreyards. The natives never carry umbrellas in the rain, but march along and do not seem to mind getting wet to the skin. They do indeed look bedraggled in their thin clothes, that cling like sticking-plaster, and it seems as if they would get the fever. During the present blow, the single pony hitched to a tram-car often found his load moving him astern, and it was only by leaving the whole car wide open, so that the air could have free passage through from end to end and side to side, that he Tiow and then made head- way against the blast. This was not pleasant for the passengers, but made less demand on the motive- power. The bands at the Luneta have played when they got a chance, but the wind howls in from the Bay, as a rule, louder than the tunes bowl out of their brass instruments. 114 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES To-day seems to be the Glorious Fourth, and my colleague and I have just come back from the ship- ping, where the Captain of the Helen Brewer asked us to eat a celebrative dinner. AU the ships ia the Bay were dressed with flags, and the Brewer, which possessed more than her share, had a long line stretched from the bowsprit over the three masts down to the stern. Everybody was interested in the feast, and the Captain with the false teeth, who comes from New Hampshire, sent over a goose and some mince-pies. Eight of us sat down in the cozy saloon and partook of a meal altogether too hearty for the climate. The day was cool and overcast, and we spent a lazy afternoon on deck, listening to yarns told by two old salts who seemed to have had more than their share of wrecks, typhoons, and other ad- ventures. When we came ashore, at about sunset, there was gathered up from the remains of the feast the " seven basketsful," and we each went back in the launch, decorated with a bag of doughnuTis under one arm and a bag of mince-pies under the other. One of our small family of dogs was run over by the tram-car the other morning, in front of the house, and now rests in peace in a little grave down on the beach, hard by the rhythmic cadence of the waves. His little brother, who was sufferiug at the time from the p O ta 0. ■= O O YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 115 distemper, was so grieved at the loss that he too speedily faded away, and now lies close beside the other victim of circumstances. On the tombstone is a touching epitaph : " Pompey and Nettie, here they lie ; Born to live, they had to die. The wheels of fate ran over one, The other was by grief undone." Most of the large army of dogs that make a Manila night hideous are of that mongrel order, which is al- ways looking for something to eat, but now and then one sees a good many of the so-caUed Chinese " chow "-dogs about the streets, and with their black tongues, long hair, and peculiar bushy tails that curl sharply up over their backs, they are quite as interest- ing, as unaffectionate. Over in China they make very good eating up to the age of three months, and from this fact derive the "chow" part of their name. Al- though they are very susceptible to changes of local- ity and climate, we are now making negotiations to have one brought over to take the place of the dear departed eulogized above. And later, I may even try the experiment of having one for Sunday dinner — if he doesn't make a good pet. The doughnuts which I brought home from the Brewer have proved very interesting to my cook, and I have been obliged to count them each day for 116 TESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES purposes of security. He now watches me closely as I make away with one or two for breakfast, to see just what effect these marvellous looking " fried holes " have on my intellect. I notice he looks to see if there are any crumbs left, from which he might gather an inkhng as to the composition of these curios ; but so far there haven't been any crumbs. As he is cooking for us now, instead of the Chinese gen- tleman that we originally had, this curiosity is but nat- ural, and some day he will probably try to furnish us with the native-made article. In fact he has already tried the experiment of concocting a mince-pie after the general appearance of one of the earlier donations made by a captain in the Bay, and the result was worthy of description. As I arranged to measure the original pie after each meal, before locking it up in our safe, in order to protect it from disappearing, my faithful cook could only guess as to its composition by sundry glances from afar. But being of an inven- tive mind he conceived the idea of chopping up some well-done roast beef, mixing with it some sugar and raisins, roofing it over with a thatch of pastry, and serving it for dessert. And then as we came to the course in question he stood in the doorway waiting for our verdict. His effort was worthy of all praise, but his pie was damnable, and pieces of it went sailing out the windows. YESTERDAYS IN" THE PHILIPPINES 117 July 28tla. On the 20tli instant a steamer arrived from Hong Kong, and had the honor of being the first vessel to come in from that port in^ thirty days. She was sup- posed to have three American mails aboard, but it turned out that they were down to arrive by the vessel coming in six days later. I came to the office the other morning, and looking toward my desk, found it almost invisible. It looked as if somebody in the neighborhood were the editor of a paper, and as if all the spring poets in the universe had sent their manuscripts for inspection. The desk groaned beneath the bulky chaos of three mails from the United States, delayed in transmission by the black plague, and fumigated together down the bay. But no sooner had we gotten through the first course of an epistolary feast than the captain of a large four- masted ship shuffled into the room and deposited a huge pot of steaming baked beans, just fresh from his steward's galley-stove, on the table. What with beans, letters, magazines, and comic papers, it might be said our day was a red-letter one. The other day my colleague and I took dinner off aboard the Nagato Maru, a smart steamer just in from Japan, and captained by an American who knows what it is to set a good table. It seems that the China-Japan war has actually broken out in all 118 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES its glory, and as there is a vague rumor that a Chi- nese war-ship is waiting outside to capture this very same steamer, she is going to stay here for awhile. The Japanese have sunk several Chinese transport ships already, and one of the unfortunate craft used to come here to Manila. In other directions the Chinese are said to have beaten the Japs badly on land, but over in this slow old moth-eaten place the daily papers will publish cablegrams from Spain by the page, that give out nothing but official stuff and Government appointments ; and when it comes to something of real interest, like a war, they wiU either be without any news whatever, or tell the whole story wrong side out in a single line, that may or may not be true. Ajid so you are probably getting better news of this whole affair, twelve thousand miles away, than we are, who are almost on the field of action. Our Manila papers consist of four pages, the first two of which are especially reserved for advertise- ments. Half of one of the inside leaves is likewise reserved, and the remaining half is covered with blocks full of gloomy sentiments which relate to the decease of this or that person. There is a little black frame of type around each square, and at the top is a cross, with a "E. I. P." or "D. O. M." under it. Below comes the name of the defunct, with hour, minute, day, and year of his birth and death, and be- YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 119 low his virtues are extolled and his friends invited to pray for the repose of his soul. Every year, each person that has died the year before has his anniver- sary, both in church and in the newspapers ; and when you recollect that out of a population of 350,000 a good many depart each twelvemonth, it is hard to see why the whole paper shouldn't consist of these notices. The other inside page contains the news, and we learn that a bad odor has been discovered up some side-street ; that a dog fell into the river and was drowned ; that a perfumery store has received a new kind of liquefied scent ; that it will probably rain in some part of the island during the day ; and that the band on the Luneta ought not to be frightened off merely by a few drops that fall from some passing cloud. And so it goes until the French or Enghsh mail comes in, and then the progressive dailies copy all the news they can find, out of the foreign papers, and serve it up cold, ceL one month, I met General Blanco, Governor of the islands, the other evening, and he seemed to enjoy the good music and good supper which one of our popular bank-man- agers and his wife provided for some of us in the col- ony on the occasion of a birthday. He is an elderly man, and kindly, and appears milder in disposition than would seem advisable for one occupying so important a position. I should think he might let 120 TESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES some of those sharp eyed little ministers of his run him, and he appears almost too modest, too kind- hearted, to be the ruler that he is. Suffice to say the General is modest in dress and modest in manner. He often Avalts up and down the Malecon promenade by the Bay in the afternoon, saluting everyone that passes, and when the vesper bells ring out the hour of prayer from one of the old churches inside the city walls he stops, removes his tall gray stove-pipe and, as do a host of other pedestrians, bows his head. To tell the truth he has little of the Spanish aspect about him and is just the kind of a man one would go up and speak to on the Teutonic or Campania. In sharp contrast is he to the Archbishop, who drives about behind his fine white horses and looks as keen as well-nourished. But who knows! Appearances are deceitful, and f ooUsh he who trusts to them. August 11th. Two steamers have just come in from Hong Kong and are tied up in quarantine down at Marivelis, at the mouth of the Bay. The mail ought to be here in forty-eight hours, but two days is a very short time to give Manila postal authorities, for they really are slow enough to desire four — one in which to make up their minds to send a launch, two in which to go, three in which to come back, and four in which to YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 121 distribute the results of their camphorated fumiga- tion. The most noteworthy thing that has happened in the way of excitement since the last mail was the operating of the new American fire-engine, Avhich we imported from the States for the wealthy proprietor of our hemp-press, who is part Spaniard, part native, and part Chinese. It seems he was up in our office one day, and on the centre-table saw a catalogue con- taining pictures of a collection of our modern fire- fighters. He asked what those things were, and, on being told that they were used to put out fires, said he wanted one at once, the biggest we could get him, in order that he might reduce the insurance he was paying on his large store-houses and still go on col- lecting the premiums from those whose goods were in his charge. Although ours is an exporting business, and we do not know much about fire-engines, yet the occasion seemed auspicious, the prospect of payment sure, and the outlook interesting. The result was that we for- warded the order to New York by the first mail, and the other day, after four months of waiting, the pieces of the big engine came over on the Esmeralda, in big cases. They were very heavy, and the natives began the exhibition by nearly dropping the boiler into the river as they attempted to hoist it into a hghter. To 122 TESTERDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES skip over tlie difficulties which ■were encountered in hoisting the cases onto the quay in front of the offices of our well-to-do purchaser, we come to the men- tal hardships that were encountered in putting the machine together ; for no one in Manila had ever seen a Yankee fire-engine before, and although we had a full description of the complicated mechanism, with drawings of the parts, and numbers where each piece was to fit onto some other piece, there was no one in town who could help us much in getting it into work- ing order. Fortunately, the hemp business was didl and my colleague and I were thus enabled to give more atten- tion to this Chinese puzzle than if the fibre market had been booming. The red wheels with gold stripes were the first thing to be adjusted, and the eyes of the onlookers who happened to be strolling up and down the quay opened to large dimensions as the covering was stripped from the nickel-plated boUer and the process of establishment went on. At last the big machine was on its feet, with valves and gear adjusted, and with the slight assistance Avhich we got from a Spanish engineer who knew something about marine machinery, we found out that the whistle ought not to be screwed onto the safety-valve. Several Englishmen who happened to come by in the early stages of our efforts made sarcastic com- YESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES 123 ments on the appearance of our new toy, and could not see how an affair with so much gold paint on the wheels and so much nickel on the boiler was going to work successfully. But we did not say much, since we were well occupied in trying to find out the proper way to fiU the boiler. Someone suggested pouring the water do-\\Ti the whistle, and so, mounted on a step-ladder, one to us began the interesting ex- periment. The water seemed to run in all right, as it gurgled down through the pipes, and did not leak out of the bottom. As there did not seem to be any other loophole to the boiler, Ave concluded this must be the right method, and took turns for an hour in emptying the contents of an old kerosene tin into the whistle-valve. Next, with great trepidation, we started a fire in the gi'ate, and were rejoiced to see that the new en- gine was soon fuming away like an old veteran. It quite spruced us up to hear the fire crackle under the boiler ; but our heads became even more swelled when steam enough was generated to tickle the feed-pump into taking care of all the vacant lots in the boiler- tubes. When our friend Don Capitan found that the en- gine was going to work and knew its business, he said we must have a big trial and let aU Manila see the show. To this end he sent around printed 124 TESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPIKES programmes of what was going to take place, to all the prominent people in the city — for he was an Alderman, by the way — inviting them to inspect the working of the engine and partake of a collation afterward in the spacious buildings of the hemp- press. Wednesday, the fatal day, arrived, and the great American fire-engine stood out on the quay glisten- ing in the sun, the centre of an admiring crowd of open-mouthed natives. The Englishmen in the back- ground rather put their heads together and shook them the wrong way, as they often do at anything American, but the natives allowed their lower lips to drop from overwhelming admiration. Everybody was curious, and all were expectant, from the small kids dressed in nothing but the regulation Philippine undershirt, who played shinney with the coal for the boiler and looked down the hose-nozzle, to Don Cap- itan himself, who went around shaking by the hands all the high and mighty officials who had come to see his latest freak. My associate and I felt fairly Important as we gruffly ordered the police to clear the ground for action and blew the whistle to scare the audience. The huge suction-hose was run into the river, and our host made his pet servant jump in after it to hold the strainer out of the mud. Ten natives were stationed at the nozzle of the four-inch TESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES 125 hose, which was pointed up the small plaza running back from the quay, and while I poked up the fire to give us a little impressive smoke, Kand rang the bell and turned on steam. The affair worked admirably, and the big stream of yellow water went so far as to gently soak down a lot of baled tobacco that was lying on a street-corner at the next block, supposedly beyond reach. The owner of the tobacco, thinking that a thunder-storm had struck the town, came to the door of his office, just behind, to see what was up, and, as the engine suddenly began to work a little better, the stream of water somehow knocked him over and played around the entrance to his storehouse. At the rate things Avere going it looked as if the exhibition Avould prove expensive and, to avoid diplomatic complications, we shut off steam long enough to shift the hose over for a more unobstructed spurt along the river. In a few moments after the change had been made an open throttle made a truly huge torrent belch from the long nozzle with such force as to make the ten hose-men feel decidedly nervous, but it did not stop them from turning the stream toward a lighter which was being poUed down the Pasig by two Malays. The foremost was washed backward into the lighter, and the hindmost swept off into the river as if he had been a cockroach. A Chinaman who was 126 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES paddling a load of vegetables to tlie Esmeralda in a hollow tree-trunk suffered the same fate. He and his greens were swished out of the banca in an instant, and he found himself sitting on his inverted craft floating helplessly down-stream. Then suddenly, as we opened the throttle to the last notch, the hose-men, in their excitement to wet some coolies loading hemp, far up the quay, tried to turn the torrent back onto the pavement, but, with its force of fifteen hundred gallons to the minute, it was too quick for them, and with one mighty " kerchug " broke away to send the nozzle flying around like a mill-wheel. Before they knew what struck them the ten men holding the nozzle were knocked prostrate, and two smaU boys in under- shirts, who were playing around in the mud-puddles near by, were whisked off into the river like so much dust. A dozen lightning wriggles of the hose, and the frenzied cataract shot a third boy through the wire door into the office of our friend, Don Capitan. Inside the door, on a wooden settee, were sitting some of the family servants holding their infants, and the same stream on which the boy travelled through the door washed the whole party, settee and all, across the hallway into a heap at the foot of the stairs. Outside, the audience stampeded, and the man in YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 127 the river, holding on to the suction hose, had hard work to prevent being drawn up through the strainer and pumped out the other end in fragments. All this took place in a quarter of the time it takes to tell of it, and events followed each other in such quick succession that the hose had started to turn over on its back and charge on the engine before one of us rushed in to shut oS steam. The two boys washed into the river were fished out more dead than alive, but more frightened than hurt, and the native Philippine policeman on duty at the front arrested them promptly for daring to be drowned. The boy blown through the screen-door had his ear badly torn, and was likewise arrested for not entering the house in a more civilized manner. The natives nursed their bare feet stepped on in the rush ; the Englishmen, who had been sarcastic several days before, said nothing ; but the Spaniards asked where the collation was, and, waterlogged though they were, began to eat like good ones. The policeman marched the three boys in undershirts to the station-house, and next morning the daily newspapers devoted more space than was usual in describing the wonderful machinery that came from America, for the benefit of their read- ers, who, like that English dude of old, " didn't weahl- ly dweam that so much wattah could come out of such a wehwey diminootive-looking affaiah." 128 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES Otherwise, in Manila we are now enjoying tlie so- called veranillo, or little summer, which every year comes along about the middle of August, and which consists of two or three weeks of cool, pleasant weather, that comes between the rains of July and the typhoon season of September. And fine weather it is, with a jolly breeze blowing in from the China Sea all day, with delightful afternoons, moonlight nights, and fresh mornings. September 20th. There has been no opportunity to start letters off for the other side of the globe since the early days of the present month, on account of a typhoon which has visited our fair capital, and which has so de- layed steamers that all connections seem to have been scattered to the four winds. I have long been waiting to become acquainted with one of these aerial disturbances, and at last the meteorological monotony has been broken. Early in this eventful week, warnings came from our most excellent observatory, run by the Jesuit priests, that trouble was brewing down in the Pacific to the south and east, and by Friday signal No. 1 of the danger system was displayed on the flagstaff of the look-out tower. The news about the storm was indefinite, but the villain was supposed to be slowly moving northwest, headed directly for Manila. Sat- YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 129 urday up went signal No. 2, and in the afternoon No. 3, and by evening No. 4. Still everything was calm and peaceful, and Sunday morning dawned pleasant but for the exception of a dull haze. Early in the afternoon up went signal No. 5, which means that things are getting pretty bad, and which is not far from No. 8, the worst that can be hoisted. Everybody now began to get ready for the invis- ible monster. All the steamers and ships in the river put out extra cables, and the vessels in the Bay ex- tra anchors. No small craft of any kind were per- mitted to pass out by the breakwater, and later navigation in the river itself was prohibited. Still everything was calm and quiet, but the haze thick- ened and low scud-clouds began to sail in from the China Sea. Shortly after tiffin at our residence by the seaside, our gaze was attracted by a native com- ing do^vn the street, dressed in a black coat with shirt-tails hanging out beneath, and wearing white trousers and a tall hat. He carried a decorated cane, wore no shoes, and marched down the centre of the street, giving utterance to solemn sentences in a deep musical voice. In short, he was the official crier to herald the coming of the typhoon, and as he marched along the bells up in the old church beyond our house rang out what poets would call " a wild, warning plea." 130 YESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES The natives opposite began hastily to sling ropes over the thatch of their light shanties, and one of the Englishmen who lived not far back of us had already stretched good solid cables over the steep- sloping roof of his domicile. A sort of hush prevailed, and then sudden gusts began to blow in off the bay. The scud-clouds increased and appeared to be in a fearful hurry. The roar of the surf loudened, and one after the other of our sliding sea-shell windows had to be shut and bolstered up for precaution. The typhoon seemed to be advancing slowly, as they often do, but its course was sure. Our eight o'clock dinner-hour passed and the wind began to howl. Before turning in for the night, we moved out of our little parlor such valuable articles as might be most missed if they decided to journey off through the air in company with -the roof, and later tried to sleep amidst a terrific din of rattlings. But slumber was impossible. Our house trembled like a blushing bride before the altar, and for the triumphal music of the " Wedding March '' the tin was suddenly stripped off our rain-shed roof like so much paper. And then the racket 1 Great pieces of tin were slapping around against the house like all possessed ; the trees in the front garden were sawing against the cornices, as if they wanted to get in, and the rush of air outside seemed to generate a vacuum within. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 131 At 3 A.M. things got so bad that it seemed as if something were going to burst, and my chum and I decided to take a last look into the parlor before seek- ing the safety of the cellar. No glass would have with- stood the gusts that came pouncing in from the Bay, but our sea- shell windows did not seem to yield. The rain was sizzling in through the cracks like hot grease when a fresh doughnut is dropped into the spider, and the noise outside was deafening. As our house seemed to be holding together, however, we gave up going to the regions below, and turned in again, thankful that we were not off on the ships in the Bay. Now and then the wind lulled somewhat, and blew from another quarter, but by early morning came some of the most terrific blowings I have ever felt, resulting from the change of direction. Down came all the wires in the main street; over went half a dozen nipa houses to one side of us, and " kerplunk " broke off some venerable trees that for many years had withstood the blast. The street was a mass of wreckage, as far down as the eye could see, and few signs of life were visible. During the rest of the day the wind blew most fiercely, but from the change of direction it was easy to see that the centre of the typhoon was passing off to the northwest. I sallied out later in the afternoon, dressed in not much more than a squash-hat, a rubber coat, and a pair 132 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES of boots, whose soles were holy enough to let the water out as fast as it came in. It was as much as one could do to stand against the blast, but I managed to keep along behind the houses, cross the streets, and reach the Luneta, where aU the lamps bent their heads with broken glass, and where the huge waves were flying far up into the air in their efforts to dis- pose of the stone sea-waU. The clvmips of fishing and bath houses which stood perched on posts out in the surf were being fast battered to pieces, and those which were not minus roof and sides were washed up into the road as driftwood. The natives were rushing gingerly hither and thither, grabbing such logs as they could find, while some of the fisher- men's families were crouching behind a stone wall watching then- wrecked barns, and sitting on their saucepans, furniture, and babies, to keep them from_ sailing skyward. The sm'f was tremendous, the vessels in the bay were shrouded in spray, and several of them seemed almost to be ashore in the breakers. A steamer appeared to have broken adrift and was locked in the embrace of a Nova Scotia bark. But everything comes to an end and as night drew on the ■svinds and rain subsided and comparative quiet succeeded a season of exaggerated movement and din. The typhoon was wide in diameter, perhaps twq YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 133 hundred miles, and so was not destructive, like the 'one that laid Manila low way back in the '80's. It seems that the larger the diameter of one of these circular storms, the less its intensity, and although the wind at any given time is moving with tremen- dous velocity within the circle, the whole disturbance is not advancing at a pace much over a dozen miles an hour. After the typhoon came the floods, and the old Pasig covered the adjacent country. The water con- cealed the road to the up-town club at Nagtajan under a depth of several feet, and one could without difficulty row into the billiard-room or play water- polo in the bowling-alley. Two of my friends were nearly drowned by trying to drive when they should have swum or gone by boat. The pony walked off with their carriage into a rice-field, in the darkness, and was drowned in more than eight feet of water. The boys only crawled out with difficulty, and just managed to reach " dry land " (that with three feet of water over it) in the nick of time. As it was, one of them practically saved the other's life, and has since been presented with a gold watch, which does not run. One of the bank-managers was to give a dinner- dance at his house next evening, to which everyone was invited, when word came that his bungalow could only be reached by boats, and that the festivities 134 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES would have to be put off until the parlor floor ap- peared. To the north, where the actual centre of the typhoon passed, the railway was swept away, the telegraph line that connects with the cable to Hong Kong torn down, and the country in general laid under water. But the show is now concluded, and business, which had been paralyzed for a week, once more starts up with the coming of the cablegrams. Manila life goes on as ever, and it is curious to note how fast the days and weeks slip backward. Everyone agrees that the most rapid thing in town, except the winds of the typhoons, is the speed with which the Philippine to-day becomes yesterday. The secret seems to lie in the fact that there are no land- marks by which to remember the weeks that are gone. The trees are green all the year round, and there are no snow-storms to mark the contrast be- tween winter and summer. There are no class-days, no ball-games, and no coming out in spring fashions to break the orderly procession of the sun, moon, and stars. We wear our white starched suits every day in the year, and one's wardrobe is not replete with various checks, plaids, and stripes that mark an epoch in one's appearance. We cannot, like Teufelsdroch, in " Sartor Kesartus," speculate much on the " clothes philosophy," though we may do so on the centres of indifference ; for our garments are not complex YESTERDAYS IIT THE PHILIPPINES 135 enougli to invite transcendental theorizing. Manila food is alike from Christmas morn to the following Christmas eve, and so, take it all in all, the past is practically without milestones, and seems far shorter than one in which many events make the measured steps more clearly differentiated. At present everybody dates his ideas from the typhoon, and that wiU remain a landmark for some time, if the fire which took place the other evening on the banks of the river does not usurp its po- sition. Ten thousand bales of hemp, and a lot of copra, sugar, and cocoanut-oil were sent aloft in less earthly form, ^sthetically the sight was beautiful, and the eye was charmed by the mingling of vast tongues of blue, green, red, and yellow flames, some of which burst forth from the very waters of the river itself on which the inflammable materials had excur- sioned. Our new fire-engine was on hand for the first time, in actual service, and, together with the small English engine brought out from London, did its duty. America, as usual, was in the lead, and everybody stood aghast to see the big five-inch stream mow down the brick walls of the burning houses like grain before the reaper. One native in particular, whose frail hut was washed to splinters by that big cataract played upon it to save it from the flames, said he'd rather lose his property by fire than to stand by 136 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES and see the blooming hortiba (fire-engine) blow it all to bits. Tlie local department, as usual, lost their heads, and while some began to chop the tiles off the roofs of neighboring houses, others directed the streams from the hand-pumps onto the choppers. Even our gallant friend the American broker, who helps swell the number of Yankee business men in Manila to four, almost got roasted aUve by being shut into an iron vault as he tried to rescue some valuable papers belonging to a customer and had to be soused with water, after his miraculous escape, to lower his temperature. But at length Providence and water prevailed, and the damage did not come to more than half a million dollars. vn A Series of Typhoons — A Chinese Feast-day — A Bank-holiday Excur- sion— Lost in the Mist — Los Banos — Tlie " Enchanted Lake " — Six Dollars for a Human Life — A Religious Procession — Celebra- tion of the Expulsion of the Chinese — Bicycle Races and Fire- works. October 5th. Phew ! We have hardly had time to breathe since the last mail, for we have been in the midst of ty- phoon after typhoon, shipwrecks, house- wrecks, and telegraph-wrecks, both simplex and duplex. Manila had scarcely gotten over talking of the war of the elements, above spoken of, before another cyclone was announced to the south, and soon we were going through an experience similar to that re- lated the other day. When that was over, every- body began to draw breath again, but before the lungs of the populace were fully expanded, the wind suddenly went into that dangerous quarter, the north- west, and up went signal No. 5 again. The blow came on more suddenly than the former one, and aU hands left the business offices to go home and sit on their roofs. The tin was again stripped like paper from our portico, and great masses of metal banged 137 138 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES around outside with the clash of cymbals. It was a terrific night. The ships in the Bay dragged their anchors nearly to the breakwater, and in the morniug four Spanish brigs were a total wreck. One in partic- ular went ashore on the bar at the river's mouth, and at daylight was being swept fore and aft by the great seas. Eight men were hanging on for dear Mfe, and it looked as if they would be swallowed up in the great drink, but two big lifeboats were got out, and as the sea moderated somewhat, the sailors were at length rescued, just as their ship went all to smash. A thousand houses were blown down, many of the streets in Manila were flooded, telegraph lines pros- trated, and tram-car service interrupted. But things have now quieted down, and Sunday was a big feast-day in the Chinese quarter. All the wealthy Chinamen were celebrating something or other, and they invited all the foreign merchants, as well as their local friends, to the celebration. They served tea and refreshments in their various little junk shops, and some of the more influen- tial members of the colony of fifty thousand gave elaborate spreads, followed by dances and concerts. The streets were filled with peculiar processions of men carrying banners and graven images, and the sidewalks were lined with spectators. I went to one of the most pretentious of the indoor YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 139 functions, found myself in a gorgeously furnished suite of apartments, decorated in true Chinese fashion, and was royally entertained by a shrewd Celestial who was supposed to be worth several million dollars. He began conversation with me by saying that, in his belief, bathing was injurious, and that he had not taken a bath in thirty years. From all I could judge, others of his brethren seemed to hold the same views as he, and the long rooms, halls, and corridors in due season got to be so warm and fragrant that it was a relief to escape. Now and then the bells in the big church rang lustily, and many lanterns lighted it up from cornice to keystone. Hundreds of carriages drove through the streets, apparently bound nowhere in particular, and the bands played in all quarters. It almost seems as if each Aveek in the calendar brought in a religious display of some sort in some one part of the town, and every Sunday evening finds a big church somewhere blazing with light or a street blinking with candles. November 13tli. The Monday after the departure of the monthly direct mail from Manila to the Peninsula is always devoted to our old friend " bank-holiday," and all the foreigii merchants close their doors. This event occurred the first of this week, and on Saturday after- 140 YESTERDA.TS IN THE PHILIPPINES noon last some of the more energetic of us, deciding to take another little outing into the hills, started up the river on a small launch, bound for the big lake at the foot of the mountains. A drizzling rain was fall- ing and the weather did not look propitious, but we pushed on, left the mouth of the river where the lake empties into it, and sallied out on the broad waters of the Laguna de Bay. Numerous serving-boys, boxes of china, food, ice, and bedding ballasted the stern of our little steamer, and as it grew dark a feast was prepared for us on deck. In going up the lake, the pilot, who was accustomed only to navigating the launch along the quays of Manila itself, got quite at sea and lost his way in the evening mist. Some of us, however, more nautical than the rest, procured a chart, consulted a compass which the native mariner in his stupidity chose utterly to disregard, and by dint of perseverance brought the frail bark back into her proper course, without further mishap than run- ning through a series of fish-weirs. We anchored near a little settlement, Los Banos, shortly before midnight. The deck planking did not make a soft bed, but nevertheless the snoring soon became hard likewise, and Sunday morning found us refreshed by the bracing air of the provinces. The rain had cleared away, and after an early breakfast the pilot ran the launch slowly ashore on a smooth YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 141 beach, beneath a high bank fringed with bamboo. The gang-plank was run out, and several of our little party started off with guns to get some duck, snipe, and pigeons, which were plentiful in the jungle be- yond. Those of us who were left, with a couple of native guides, climbed up the steep slopes of an extinct vol- cano to explore a so-called " Enchanted Lake " that occupied the low crater. The way led past several ponds filled to overflowing with pink pond-Ulies, and, as we wound up along the rising knolls, the air was as fragrant as that of a greenhouse. Then came a short climb which brought us to the crater's edge. The Enchanted Lake lay like a mirror below, and the rich foliage all about was almost perfectly re- flected in the still, green water. The locality being romantic, it is quite regular that there should be connected with it an interesting story which seems to bear on its face the evidences of truth. It seems there used to live a fisherman and his wife hard by the sloping bants that surround the En- chanted Lake. One day, so the story goes, the fisherman's spouse had reason to suspect the fidelity of her husband, and aflame with pious rage, she con- cocted a scheme to rid herself of her worser half. Calling upon two rival fishermen whose hut was not far distant, she promised them the large amount of 142 YESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES twelve dollars if they would put her husband out of the way. This being a pot of money to them, they agreed to her proposition, and during one of the next excursions out to the distant fish-weirs in the parent lake below, contrived to tip him overboard and hold him under. Coming back in the afternoon, they went to the hut of the freshly made widow and demanded the twelve dollars. "I can give you but six," said she, "for I'm hard up." "But you promised us twelve if we would do the business," said they. " But I tell you I can give you but six," responded the widow. " Take that or nothing." Angry at having been thus deceived, the two murder- ers excitedly paddled over to the neighboring village of Los Banos, went to the cuartel, presided over by a Spanish official, and addressed him with these words : "A lady over there by the Enchanted Lake prom- ised us twelve dollars if we would kill her husband. We have done the job and asked her for our money, but she will only give us six. We want you to arrest her." The official, thinking the whole thing a joke, laugh- ingly said he would attend to the matter. The two simple-minded criminals went off, apparently satis- fied, and disappeared. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 143 Later, our friend the official tliought there might be some truth behind the apparent absurdity of the yarn, and on investigation found that a murder had actually been committed. But someone more cred- ulous than the Spaniard gave a friendly warning to the committers of the deed, and they were not brought to justice until some months afterward. Such is the comparative esteem in which the native holds human life and Mexican dollars. Later we descended again to the bold coast-line of the Lagima de Bay and, to the accompaniment of banging guns, which showed that some of the rest of our party were really on the war-path, returned laimch- ward. The hunting-expedition came in soon after with large bags of snipe and pigeon, and all hands then joined in a series of dives off the stern of our boat, or soused around in the tepid water. The group of savages living in the huts near by were much startled at our taking plunges headlong. They them- selves never dive otherwise than feet first, for it is a common superstition among the Filipinos that the evil water-spirits would catch them by the head and hold them under if this article came along before the feet put in an appearance. At noontime our native cooks did themselves proud in getting up a game breakfast, and in the afternoon the launch backed off and steamed across the narrow 144 TESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES bay to Los Bancs itself, a little town clustering around some boiling springs whose vapor floats over a good hotel and some elaborate bathing-establish- ments. This seems to be a rather favorite resort for the Spanish population of Manila at certain times of the year, and once or tmce a week the old side- wheeler Laguna de Bay stops here on her way up from the capital to Santa Oruz. Behind the town the land slopes steeply up to the mountain heights of stUl another extinct volcano, whose ghost exists merely to give life to the hot waters of the springs below. In front it runs off to the lake shore, and, all in all, the scenery is as picturesque as the air is healthy. From Los Banos we crossed the lake, cruised down along the abrupt mountainous shores between the two fine old promontories of Halla Halla, that jut out like the prongs to a W, and stopped every now and then at some particu- larly attractive little native village coming down to the water's edge. At about sundown on Monday afternoon, the prow was turned Manilaward, and after a cool sunset sail of twenty miles we drew in at the portico of the uptown club, all the better for our two day's trip, which cost us each but a little over five gold dollars. Last night there occurred another one of those re- ligious torchlight processions which are so common YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 145 in the streets of Old Manila. It started after sunset, inside the city walls, from a big church brightly illu- minated from top to bottom with small candle-cups that gave it the appearance of a great sugar pal- ace. The procession consisted of many richly deco- rated floats, containing life-size figures of saints and apostles dressed in garments of gold and purple and borne along by sweating coolies, who staggered underneath a draping that shielded from view all save their lower limbs and naked feet. The larger floats were covered with dozens of candelabra and guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. Other roUing floats of smaller magnitude were pulled along by little children in white gowns, while troops of old maids, young maids, and Spanish women marched be- fore and behind, dressed in black and carrying candles. The black mantillas which feU gracefully from the heads of many of the torch-bearers gave their faces a look of saint-like grace, except at such times as the evening breeze made the candle-grease refractory, and one might easily have imagined him- self a spectator at a celebration in Seville. Many bands all playing different tunes in differ- ent times and keys, rows of hard-faced, fat-stom- ached priests trying to look religious but failing completely to do so, and five hundred small boys, who, like ours at home, formed a sort of rear guard 146 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES to the solemnities, all went to make up the peculiar performance. The whole long affair started from the church, wound through the narrow streets, and finally brought up at the church again, where it was saluted by fireworks and ringing of bells. In the balconies of the houses that almost overhung the route were smiling crowds of lookers-on, and Eo- man candles and Bengola lights added impressiveness to the scene, or dropped their sparks on the garments of those promenading below. As the various images of the Virgin Mary and the Descent from the Cross passed by, everyone took off his hat and appeared deeply impressed with religious feeling. After the carriers of the floats had put down for good their expensive burdens in the vestry of the chui'ch, a few liquid refreshments easily started them quarrelling as to the merits of their respective displays. One set claimed that their Descent from the Cross was more life-like than that carried by their rivals, and they almost came to blows over which of the Virgin Marys wore the finest clothes. Yesterday was the celebration of the expulsion of the Chinese invaders from the Philippines, about a hundred years ago, and the whole city was aglow with flags and decorations. In the afternoon every- body went to the Liineta to see the bicycle races and to hear the music. A huge crowd surged around the YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 147 central plaza, and the best places in the band-stand were reserved for the Siaanisli ladies and Government dignitaries. The races were slow, but the crowd cheered and seemed perfectly satisfied as one after another of the contestants tipped over going around the sharp corners. After the races a beautiful Span- ish maiden, whose eyes were so crossed that she must have easily mixed up the winning bicycle with the tail-ender, distributed the prizes, and the police had hard work to keep the crowd from overwhelming the centre of attraction. Then everybody listened to the music, walked or drove around in carriages, and waited for the fireworks, which were set off not long after sunset. The costly display was accompanied by murmurings of " Oh ! " from hundreds of throats. There was an Eiffel Tower of flame, several mixed- up crosses that twisted in and out of each other, nu- merous scroll-wheels, fountains, and a burst of bombs and rockets. Some of the parachute stars gracefully floated out over the Bay and descended into the water, causing startled exclamations from the natives, who are not accustomed to look, on fire- works with equanimity. But as of old, everything finally ended in smoke, and the multitude melted away, thoroughly satisfied with the celebration of the anniversary of the victory over the Chinese. As it seems about time to take a longer rest than, 148 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES usual from the labor attendant on waiting for a boom in the hemp market, I hope next week to start off on one of the well-equipped provincial steamers, that makes a run of two thousand miles south, among the sugar-islands and the hemp-ports, and in the next chapter there ought to be a rather long account of what is said to be a very interesting voyage. VIII A Trip to the South — Contents of the " Puchero "— Romblon— Cebu, the Southern Hemp-Centre — Places Touched At — A Rich Indian at Camiguin — Tall Trees — Primitive Hemp-Cleaners — A New Volcano — Mindanao Island — Moro Trophies— Iligan—Iloilo — Back Again at Manila. December 23, 1894. I HAVE just returned from the south, and feel able enough to begin the narrative. On Saturday, De- cember 1, thick clouds obscured the sky, and gusty showers of rain continued to fall until evening, when they formed themselves into a respectable downpour. It was objectionable weather for the dry season just commencing, but the northwest monsoon was said to be heavy outside, and the rain on our east coast evidently slid over the mountains back of Manila, instead of staying where it belonged. Such was the day of starting, while, to cap the climax, just before the advertised leaving-time of the Uranus, word came from the Jesuit observatory that a typhoon was apparently getting ready to sail directly across the course we were to take, and up went signal No. 3 on the flag-staff at the mouth of the river. Philosophers, however, must not be bothered by 149 150 TESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPIKES trifles, and although my friends predicted a miserable voyage, and told me to take all my water-proofs and sou' westers, I went aboard the steamer with a smiling countenance only, followed by three " boys " who deposited my traps in a state-room of lean pro- portions. At half after seven in the evening the whistle blew, the visitors departed, and the Uranus slowly began to back down the narrow river into the black night. She is one of the largest and newest " province steamers" in the Philippines, and it took a great deal of manipulation to turn her around and get her headed toward the Bay. As large, perhaps, as one of our coasting boats that runs to the West Indies, she has a flush deck from stem to stem, and is ruled over by a very jolly, stubby, little Spanish captain who looks eminently well fed if not so well groomed. We got out of the river at eight o'clock, saw the three warning, red, typhoon lanterns glaring at us, and started full speed ahead for Eomblon, our first calling- port, eighteen hours away. Dinner was served on deck from a large table formed by closing down the huge skylights to the regular dining-saloon below, and the eaters took far more enjoyment in their Spanish bill of fare under the awnings than they would have done had the same victuals been dished up doAvnstairs. I say " victuals," for the word seems YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 151 to be the only invention for just such combinations as were set before us, and " dished up " suggests the scooped-out-of-a-Itettle process far better than " served." Spanish food is rather too mixy, too gar- licky, too unfathomable for me, but as one can get used to anything I accommodated myself to the pu- chero (a mixture of meat, beans, sausages, cabbage, and pork), and was soon eating fish as a fifth course instead of a second. The feast began with soup and sundries, and was continued by the puchero which was merely an introduction to the fish course, the roast, and all the cheese and things that fol- lowed. Every dinner was practically the same, dif- fering slightly in details, and the deck each time played its part as dining-room. Early breakfast came at six, late breakfast came at ten, and dinner poked along at five — a combination of meal hours which was enough to give one indigestion before touching a mouthful. Dui'ing the night we all waited in vain to hear the sizzling of the typhoon that came not, and got up next morning to find the scare had been for nothing. The clouds and rain were clearing away, and the prow of the Uranus was headed directly for a region of blue sky. By breakfast-time there was hardly a cloud in the heavens, the rooster up f or'ard began to crow, the mooly-cow which we were soon to eat began to moo, the islands in front 152 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES drew nearer, and the scene became fairer eacli moment. At noon we steamed below a great mountainous island, crossed a sound between it and another group, entered a narrow channel, and at one o'clock dropped anchor in the small land-locked harbor of Piomblon. Every- where the hills fell abruptly into the water, and houses looked as if they had slid do^vn off the steep slopes to hobnob with each other in a mass below. There was a public bath down beside a brook, where everybodj' came to wash, an old church, the market-place, and a prodigious long flight of steps leading up to the upper districts, where the view down back over the low nipa houses toward the bay was most extensive. We stayed in this little Garden of Eden until after three o'clock, then pulled out to the steamer, and left again for the south, over a calm sea and beneath a glorious sky. Some of us slept on deck in the moonlight, but, finding it if anything too cool and breezy, were up betimes to see the island of Cebu looming on our right hand. Our early six-o'clock breakfast finished, we sat up on the bridge in easy- chairs, beneath the double awning, as the Uranus poked down along the mountainous coast toward the city of Oebu. At ten o'clock we passed through the nan-ow channel that leads between a small island and its big brother Cebu, and soon saw the white houses of the town lapping the harbor's edge. Two Ameri- A Cilizeii from the Interior. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 163 can ships were apparently taking in their cargoes of hemp, and beside them a small fleet of native craft and steamers smudged the little bay. Anchor was dropped again and those of us who cared to go ashore met some of our former friends from Manila on 'change and took a look over this great hemp-centre of the South. The local excitement was limited, and, except that a Chinaman had been beheaded by some enemy the night before as he was walking home through the street, news was scarce. Numerous people, however, were gathered together outside the police-station, looking at the remains, and several sailors from the American ships, who had swum ashore during the night to get drunk, were being returned to then- vessels in charge of the civil guard. The Uranus was not to stop long, and most of the through passengers returned early to the steamer to enjoy a view tempered by rather more breeze and less smell than that Avhich the narrow streets afforded. Cebu, from the deck, was worthy of a sonnet; the white houses and church spires were set off against the dark-green background of mountains, and as the sun got lower the place did not have the broiled- alive aspect that it bore during the middle of the day. At four the stubby little Captain came aboard, and soon we turned northeast for our next stopping- 154 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES place, Ormoc. Another colored sunset, another din- ner in the golden light, another moonrise, another saU up among the islands, and at eleven on the evening of Monday we entered the harbor of Or- moc. Here two or three ponies were hoisted over- board to be taken landward, a can of kerosene was loaded into the purser's boat as he went ashore with the papers, and a little chorus of shoutings concluded our midnight visit to the second stop of the day. Tuesday morning the sun rose over the lofty moun- taius on the island of Leyte, and the Uranus shaped her course for Catbalogan, another of the larger hemp-ports. The steam up the bay blotched with islands was perfection, and by ten o'clock the anchor hunted round for a soft bed in the ooze, some eight hundred yards off a sandy beach, above which lay the town. Those of us who had energy enough to bolt our hearty breakfast were taken by the jolly-boat onto the mud flats, and were carried through the shal- low water on oars to dry land. On the slopes of the higher mountains, behind the town, the hemp-plants (looking exactly like banana-trees), grew luxuriously, and in front of many of the houses in Catbalogan the white fibre was out drying on clothes-lines. A short taste of the hot sun easily satisfied our curiosity as to Catbalogan, and we were off to the ship again for more breakfast, just as several hungry- YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 155 looking Spanisli guests, including the GoYemor's family, came aboard from the town to partake of a meal hearty enough to last them till the arrival of the next steamer. From Catbalogan to its sister town, Tacloban, four hours to the south, the course leads among the nar- row straits between high, richly wooded islands, and the scenery was most picturesque. Here and there little white beaches gleamed along the shore, and in front of the nipa shanties that now and then looked out from among the trees hung rows of hemp drying in the sun. Off and on the big waves, kicked up by the forward movement of the Uranus in the land-locked waters, woke up the stillness resting on the banks, and nearly upset small haiica loads of the white fibre which was perhaps being paddled down to some larger centre from more remote stamping- grounds. From the bridge our view was most com- prehensive, and it wasn't long before the steamer actually entered the river like strait that separates the islands of Samar and Leyte. We twisted around like a snake through the narrow channel, on each side of which were high hills and mountains, richly treed with cocoanuts and hemp-plants, and, just as the sun was getting low, hauled into Tacloban, situated in- side an arm of land that protects it from the dashing surges of the Apostles' Bay beyond. 156 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES At Tacloban tliere was little to see. A high, range of hills rose behind the town, and in the eveniag half-light everythkig looked more or less attractive. We climbed a small knoll that looked off over the Bay of St. Vetev and St. Paid to the south and doMTi over the village. The strait through which we came stretched up back among the hills like a river, and in the foreground lay the Uranus. A number of hemp store-houses lined the water-front, and as usual the ever-present Chinese were the central figures of the commercial part of the commimity. At eight the anchor came up once more, and we left Tacloban to steam religiously do^vn the bay of St. Peter and St. Paul for Cabalian, eight hours to the south. Cabalian is another httle hemp-town, at the foot of a huge mountain ; but in the starlight of the very early morning we stopped there only long enough to leave the mail and drop a pony overboard. Sunrise caught us still steering to the south, but nine o'clock tied our steamer to a little wharf in Suogao, directly in front of a large hemp-press and store-house belong- ing to the owners of the ship on which we were jour- neying. Some of the best hemp that comes to the Manila market is pressed at Surigao, and all around were stacks of loose fibre drying in the sun or being separated into different gi-ades by native coolies. Several of us left the ship and walked to the main YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPIWES 157 village, but, as before, found little to note except the intense heat of a boiling sun. There was the customary hill behind the town, and at the risk of going entirely into solution during the effort, two of us climbed to the top for a breath' of air and a panoramic view. Dinner came along as usual at five ; but I must say that the more I ate of those curiously timed meals the less I could accommodate my mental powers to the comprehension of what I was doing. Everybody knows what a difficult psychological problem it is to determine the exact numerical nature of the feeling in the second and third toes of his feet, as compared with that in the fingers of his hands. On your hands you can distinctly feel the first finger, the middle finger, and the fourth finger ; but on your feet your second toe doesn't feel like your first finger nor as a second toe should naturally feel. The great toe cor- responds in sensation to one's first finger, and all the other toes saye the last seem to be muddled up without that differentiated sensation which the fingers have. And so with these meals aboard ship. A ten o'clock breakfast was neither breakfast nor luncheon, and it bothered me considerably to know what in the dickens I was really eating. In fact, it affected my mind to such a degree that somehow the food tasted as- if it did not belong to any particular meal, but came from 158 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES another order of things j and I spent long, serious moments between the courses in trying to locate the repast in my hbrary of prehistoric .sensations, just as I have often tried to locate the digit which my second toe corresponds to in feeling. We left Surigao an hour before midnight, sailed away over moonlit seas toward the island of Cami- guin, and when I stuck my head out of the port-hole at half after five next morning, the two very lofty mountain-peaks which formed this sky-scraper of the Philippines were just ridding themselves of the garb of darkness. Three of us went ashore at seven, and were introduced to a rich Indian, who, although the possessor of four hundred thousand dollars, lived in a common little nipa house. He invited us to see the country, fitted us out with three horses and a mounted servant, and sent us up into the mountains, where his men were working on the hemp-plantations. We started up the sharp slopes, and were soon get- ting a wider and wider view back over the town and blue bay below. First the path was bounded with rice-fields, but, as we rose, the hemp plants which, as before said, look just like their relatives, the banana- trees, began to hem us in. Now and again we came to a little hut where long strings of fibre were out drying in the sun, but our boy kept going upward until we were rising at an angle of almost forty-five YESTERDAYS IN THE PlIILIPrUSTES 159 degrees. Everywhere the tall twenty-five-foot hemp- trees extended toward the mountain summit as far as the eye could carry, and we were much interested in seeing so much future rope in its primogeuital state. Up we went across brooks, over rocks, beneath tall, tropical hardwood trees, nearly two hundred feet high, that here and there lifted themselves up toward heaven and at last came to the place where the natives were actually separating the hemp from strippings by pulling them under a knife pressed down on a block of wood. The whole little machine was so absurdly simple, with its rough carving-knife and rude levers, that it hardly seemed to correspond with the elaborate transformation that took place from the tall trees to the slender white fibre separated by the rusty blade. One man could clean only twenty-five pounds of hemp a day, and when it is remembered the whole harvest consists of about 800,000 bales, or 200,000,000 pounds per year, it seems the more remarkable that so rude an instrument should have so star a part to play. We each tried pulling the long, tough strippings under the knife that seemed glued to the block, but there was a certain knack which we did not seem to possess, and the thing stuck fast. All in all this visit to the hemp- cleaners will supply us with strong answers to letters from manufacturers who have written us to make efforts in introducing heavy machines for separating 160 TESTEKDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES hemp from the parent tree, but who have failed to understand that a couple of levers and a carving knife are far easier to carry up a steep mountain-slope than a steam engine, and an arrangement as big as a mod- em reaper. We lingered about all the morning on these up-in-the-air plantations, and at noon picked our way slowly back again over the stony path to the village, glad that we didn't have to earn fifty cents a day by so laborious a method. Leaving our host with a promise to come ashore again and use his horses in the afternoon, we went down to the long pier and rowed off to the Uranus in one of the big ship's boats that was feeding her emp- ty forehold with instalments of hemp. In the early afternoon we again went ashore, took other ponies and started off up the coast toward a remarkable vol- cano, which, though not existing in 1871, has since been business-like enough to grow up out of the sandy beach, until it is now a thousand feet high. A whole town was destroyed during the growing process, but to-day the signs of activity are not so evident. The path up the mountain-side was terrifically stony and somewhat obscure. Long creepers frequently caught us by the neck, or wound themselves about oui* feet, in attempts to rid the ponies of their burden. It was a laborious undertaking, and it didn't look as if we should reach the crater before dark, but we kept on a 5 OJ fco u ^ iO ^ to D. 5= o o o YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 161 ascending, thinking eacli knoll would give us that longed-for look into the business office of the volcano. But in TaLu. It was now getting so near sunset that we feared to lose the way, and, instead of pushing on farther, we reluctantly turned about and went full speed astern. The descent was unspeakable ; the horses' knees were tired ; they stumbled badly ; the vines and creepers snarled us up, and everyone mut- tered yards of cuss-words. On the way down we saw several wonderful views over the hemp-trees to the coast below, met numerous natives cleaning up their last few stalks of fibre for the day, and at last came out once more on the rough pasture-road leading to Mambajao, off which the Uranus was anchored. It was now moonlight, we all broke into a gallop for the three-quarter-hour ride to the village, and everybody, including the jaded ponies, thanked Heaven when we reached the first lights of the town. Late the same evening the Uranus left, sailed around the island's western edge in the moonlight, and turned southward for Cagayan, on Mindanao Island, the last of the Philippines to resist subjection by the Spanish and now the scene of wars and con- flicts with the bloodthirsty savages who are indige- nous to the soU. Morning introduced us to a shaky wharf and to a group of gig-drivers, who said the town was fully 162 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES three miles away. We were in the enemy's country, but nevertheless two of us started off to walk to the YUlage, following quite a party who had already taken the road. It was an hour's plod along beneath tall cocoanut-palms before we came to the main part of the settlement, surrounding the jail, court-house, and residence of the Spanish Governor. Hard by ran a river spanned by a curious suspension-bridge. It carried the high road to the village and country on the other bank, and in our party from the steamer was an engineer who had come down to inspect this structure, which but a short time ago had utterly collapsed under the strain of its own opening exercises, killing a Spaniard, and cutting open the head of the Governor's wife. Of late, however, the bridge had been repaired, and the question seemed to be, was it safe ? For my benefit, as I walked over the long eight- hundred-foot span, the old bridge wobbled around like a bowl of jelly, and considering that there were alli- gators in the reflective waters below, 1 did not feel I was doing the right thing by my camera and friends to stay longer where I was. Some of the secondary cables were flimsy affairs, and inspection revealing the fact that the structure was just one-twentieth as strong as it ought to be, placards were put up to the effect that the bridge was closed except for the passing of one person at a time. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 163 At the bridge we fell into talk with a pleasant Spaniard, who was the interventor or official go- between iu affairs concerning Governor and natives. "We asked him as to the prospects of finding some Moro arms, knives, and shields in the settlement for being in a district upon which a recent descent had been made it seemed as if the town should be rich in bloody curios. He gave us some encourage- ment, and off we trotted across the central plaza with its old church, on an expedition of search. It seems that all the houses around this plaza were armed to the teeth, and in time of need the whole place could be transformed into a fort. Every house in the pueblo had one of the newest type of Mauser rifles standing up in the corner, and in fifteen minutes fifteen hundred men could be mustered ready armed to fight the savage Moros. We really felt as if we were in one of the Indian outposts of early American days, and were quite interested in the conversation of our guide, who seemed to take a great liking to two foreigners. We went into several little huts where knives and spears were hung upon the doors, and succeeded in exchanging many of our dollars for rude, weird weapons with waving edges or poisoned points. We passed several "tamed" Moros in the street and took off some bead neck- laces, turbans, and bracelets Avhich they had on. 164 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES Further search revealed shields and hats, and be- fore the morning turned to afternoon we had visited nearly half the houses in the village. Sometimes a tune on the ever-present piano, coaxed out by yours truly, would bring a shield from off the wall, and at others the more telling music coming from the jing- ling dollars was more effectual. For dinner we went to the house of the interventor to lunch on some grass mixed with macaroni, canned fish, bread and water, and if I hadn't been so much oc- pied with our Spanish conversation I might have felt hungry. After the meal our host wanted me to take a photograph of him and his wife dressed up in a discarded theatrical costume, and it was quite as lu' dicrous as anything on the trip. An upholstered throne — part of the stage-setting in their play of the week before — was rigged up in the back yard, and the seSor and senora, robed as king and queen of Axagon, put on all the airs of a royal family as they stood before the camera. These good people pulled the house to pieces to show us wigs, crowns, and wooden swords, and it seemed as if we should never get away. Later, however, our good friend borrowed a horse in one place, a carriage in another, helped us to go aroimd and collect our various purchases, pre- sented me with a shield which he took down off his own wall, and drove us back to the steamer. Here YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 165 we unloaded all the stuff, and, sui-rounded by a curi- ous throng of questioners, went aboard to stow our possessions away. The day had been a proHfic one, and, although we had not expected to go into the curio business on the excursion, our respective state- rooms were now loaded up with gimcracks that would interest the most rabid ethnographer. Toward midnight the Uranus steamed out of the Bay of Cagayan and headed for Misamis, still farther south. Another calm night, and Saturday morning saw us approaching a little collection of nipa huts presided over by an old stone fort and backed up by the usual high range of mountains. Two Spanish gunboats, the Elcano and Ulloa, all flags flying, in honor of Sunday or something were at anchor in the Bay, and at eight o'clock we pulled ashore to frit- ter away an hour or so in looking about an un- interesting village. There was a saying here that no photographer ever lived to get fairly into the town, for the only two who had ever come before this way were drowned in getting ashore from their vessels. As I walked about the streets, several Indian women stuck their heads out of the windows of their huts seeming quite amazed to see a live picture-maker, and asked in poor Spanish how much I would charge for a dozen copies of their inimitable physiognomies. Misamis business detained the Uranus but for a 166 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES sliort hour, and slie then turned her head across the Bay eastward for Iligan, the seat of all the war oper- ations in Mindanao. During the two hours and a half that our coui'se led close along the hostile shore, we had breakfast and arrived at Iligan, the most dis- mal place in the world, about two o'clock in the afternoon. Everything looked down-in-the-mouth except the thermometer, and that was up in the roar- ing hundreds. The town was like all other Philip- pine villages, except that around the outsldi-ts were the rains of an old stockade with observation-towers, and in the streets soldiers, both native and Spanish, held the corners at every tiu-n. While I paddled across a creek to get a photo- graph of some friendly savages on the other bank, one of my steamer friends went up to the Government house to make a formal visit. It seems he found no one at home except the wife of one of the high de- partment officials, and she was reading the latest let- ters just fresh from the mail-bag of the Uranus. As I got back from across the river I heard a tremendous pandemonium going on in the upper story of the building in question, and soon my fellow-passenger came bolting do'mi the stairs and out into the street below. The poor woman, on reading iu her freshly opened letter that her husband, who had but recently gone up to Manila for a week's stay, was an abscond- YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 167 er to the extent of some three hundred thousand dol- lars, suddenly lost her mind. He had tried to get across to China, so it seemed, but Avas taken on the sailing-day of the steamer, and the wife now first heard the news. So, as chairs and flower-pots came sailing out the windows or down the stairs, we wise- ly decided to get out of harm's way, and together walked back to the steamer-landing, musing on Span- ish methods of pocket-lining. The Moros themselves are sturdy beggars, though most picturesque ones, and the tame specimens that came into IHgan were curious in the extreme. Dressed in native-made cloths of all colors, their heads were ornamented with turbans of red and white and blue, while gaudy sashes gave. them an air of aristocratic distinction which few of their northern brothers possessed. Some of them black all their teeth, others only put war-paint on their two front pairs of ivories, and while some looked as if they had no chewing machinery at all, others appeared as if they might only have played centre rush on a modern foot-ball team. For years now Spain has sent men and gun-boats down to Mindanao to wipe out the savages and bring the island under complete subjection, but with- out avail. Young boys from the north have been drafted into native regiments to go south on this 168 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES fatal errand. The prisons of Manila have been emptied and the conTicts, armed with holos or meat-choppers, have followed their more righteous brethren to the front. Well-trained native troops have gone there ; Spanish troops have gone ; o£Scers have tried it, but to no end. If, in the storming of some Moro stronghold, a dozen miles back inland from the beach, the convicts in the front rank were cut to pieces by the enemy, it was of no importance. If the drafted youths were slaughtered, there were more at home. If the native troops failed to carry the charge, things began to look serious. But if the Spanish companies were touched, it was time to flee. Such have been the tactics in this great grave-yard, and where the Moros lost the day, fever stepped in and won. The towns along the coast are Spain's, but the interior still swarms with savages, who are there to dispute her advance and are daily tramping over the graves of many of her soldiers. We left Moro land at eight o'clock in the evening, after dining various officials who came aboard to see what they could get to eat, and by Sunday morn- ing at sunrise had crossed northward to the island of Bohol, dropping anchor in Maribojoc, a small unin- teresting place with an old church, a Spanish padre who had not been out of town in thirty years long enough ever to see a railroad or a telephone, and the Moro Chiefs from Mindanao. Sec page i6y. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 169 usual collection of tMck-lipped natives. We stayed here to unload a lot of bulky school-desks and chairs destined to be used by the semi-naked youth of the vicinity, and a few of our company went ashore merely to walk lazily about the village. Next, a second stop at Cebu for the mails bound Manilaward, a good-by for the second time to our friends, and the Uranus now kept back down the coast toward Dumaguete, a prosperous town on the rich sugar-island of Negros. At ten o'clock that night we were off again, and Tuesday noon ushered us in to Hoilo, the second city of the Philippines. A lot of " go-downs " (store-houses) and dM'eUings on the swampy peninsula made a fearfully stupid-looliing place, and the glare off the sheet-iron roofs was blind- ing. Scarcely a foot above tide-water, Iloilo was far less prepossessing than Manila, but everyone seemed cordial, and friends were so glad to see us that we appeared to confer a favor in stopping off to see them. The surroundings of Iloilo are far more picturesque than those of Manila, and just across the bay a wooded island, whose high altitude stands out in bold contrast to the marshes over which the city steeps, gave an outlook from the town that compensat- ed for the inlook over dusty streets and dirty quays. The English club occupied its usually central position in the commercial section of the city, and formed an 170 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES oasis of refreshment in tlie midst of the thirsty desert of iron roofs surrounding it. And if any single stanza of verse could have been quoted to describe the feel- ings of a newly arrived guest, sitting in a long chair on the club piazza and looking off at the bubbling volumes of hot air rising from those roofs, it would have been that in which the poet says : " Where the latitude's mean and the longitude's low, Where the hot winds of summer perennially blow, Where the mercury chokes the thermometer's throat, And the dust is as thick as the hair on a goat. Where one's throat is as dry as a mummy accursed. Here lieth the land of perpetual thirst." The afternoon-tea hour is perhaps more carefully observed among the English business houses here than in the capital to the north, and we left the very good little club, with its billiard-tables and stale newspapers, to join one of the regular gatherings in the large office of a friend. But tea, toast, jam, and oranges had no sooner been set before us than the deep whistle of the Uranus sounded, and those of us who were going north had to make a hurried adjour-nment to the neighboring wharf. Then, as everybody on deck began to say " adios," and everybody on shore " hasta la vista," the stubby little captain roared out " avante '' and our steamer started for Manila, two hundred and fifty miles away. TESTEKDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES 171 Next morning we got our first taste of the monsoon, and it came up pretty rough as we crossed some of the broad, open spaces between the islands. There were three dozen passengers aboard ship, and every- body, including four dogs, was desperately sea-sick. But sheltering islands soon brought relief to the pre- vailing misery, the dogs recovered their equilibrium enough to renew the curl in their tails, and the heaA'- ing vessel grew quite still. We touched again at Romblon, on our way up, long enough to get the mail and bring off an unshaven padre or two, bound up to the capital for spiritual refreshment, and for the last time headed for Manila. The monsoon apparently went down with the sun ; we were not troubled further with heaving waters, and early on Thursday morning passed through the narrow mouth of Manila Bay, just as the sun was rising in the east, and the full moon setting over Mariveles in the west. The Uranus made a short run across the twenty-seven miles of water to the anchorage among the shipping, and everybody bundled ashore in a noisy launch, almost before the town had had its breakfast. In the afternoon, when the steamer came into the river, I brought all of my arms, armor, and shells ashore to the office, and the American skippers who were waiting for free breezes from the punkah began outbidding each other with offers of baked 172 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES beans and doughnuts for the whole collection. At home, the house had not been blown away, but was firm as ever ; the dogs rejoiced to see me back ; the cat, with a crook in her tail, purred extra loudly; the ponies, that had grown fat on lazy living, pawed the stone floor in the stable; the boy put flowers on the table for dinner and peas in the soup, and the moon looked in on us in full dress. Thus ended a foi-tnight's trip of some two thousand miles down through the arteries of the archipelago. IX Club-house Chaff— Christmas Customs and Ceremonies — New Year's Calls— A Dance at the English Club— The Royal Exposition of the Philippines — Fireworks on the King's Fete Day— Electric Lights and the Natives — The Manila Observatory — A Hospitable Governor — The Convent at Antipolo. December 26th. '"A YOUNG Bostonian, in business in the Philip- pines,' that is you, isn't it ? " " ' Trembling like a bkishing bride before the altar.' " " Well, blushing bride, how are you ? " " ' The bells in the old chru'ch rang out a wild, warning plea.' They did, did they ? And did, 'The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea? ' " " 'The fishermen's wives were sitting on their sauce- pans, furniture, and babies, to keep them from sailing off skyward.' Poor things ! Quite witty, weren't they ? " These were some of the expressions that greeted me as I entered the Club the other evening, about two hours after the last mail arrived. My attention was called to the bulletin-board where the official notices were posted, and there, tacked up in all its glory was a printed copy of my letter on the 173 174 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES typhoon, while on all sides were various members of the English colony, laughing boisterously, and jjoking me in the ribs with canes and billiard-cues. Some of the brokers had apparently learned the contents of that fatal letter by heart, and stood on chairs recit- ing those touching lines in dialogue with unharnessed levity. To say that I was mildly flummuxed at hearing my familiar verbiage proceeding from the mouths of others would be mild, but it was impossible not to join in the general laugh, and digest, in an offhand way, the jibes and jokes which were epidemic. It seems my cautions have been of no avail, and the letter which you so kindly gave the Boston editor to read and print was sent out here to my facetious friend the American broker, whose whole life seems to be spent in trying to find the laugh on the other man. Somebody else also sent him a spare copy to give to his friends, and down town at the tiffin club next noon, my late entrance to the breakfast-room was a signal for the whole colony to suspend mastication and with clattering knives and clapping hands to vent their mirth in breezy epithets. But jokes are few and far between in this far Eastern land, and somebody or other might as well be the butt of them. Just as surely as the 24th of December comes around, all the office-boys of your friends, who have YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 175 perha]JS brought letters from their counting-room to yours, all the chief cooks and bottle-washers of your establishment, all of the policemen on the va- ' rious beats between your house and the club, and all the bill-collectors who come in every month to wheedle you out of sundry dollars, have the cheek to ask for pourboires. Imagine a man coming around to collect a bill, and asking you to fee him for being good enough to bring that document to hand. But that is just what the Manila bill-collector does at Christmas- tide. Then all of the native fruit-girls, who each day climb the stairs with baskets of oranges on their heads, come in with little printed blessings and hold out their hands for fifty cents. Once out of the office, you go home to find the ice- man, the ashman, the coachman, and the cook all looking for tips, and you are compelled to feel most religiously holy, as you remember that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Christmas-eve, somehow, did not seem natural, though the town was very lively. Some of the shops had brought over evergreen branches from Shanghai to carry out the spirit of the occasion. The streets were crowded with shoppers, everybody was carrying parcels, and if it had been cold, we might have looked for Santa Clans. There are but half a dozen English ladies in our 176 YESTERDAYS IN THE PniLIPPINES little Anglo-Saxon colony, and each of tliem takes a turn in giving dinners, asking as lier guests, besides a few outsiders, the other five. On Christmas-eve took place one of these rather stereotyped feasts, and afterward the guests went down in carriages to the big cathedral, that cost a million dollars, inside the old walled town, to hear the midnight mass. Ac- companied by a large orchestra and a good organ, the mass was more jolly than impressive. The music consisted of polkas, jigs, and minuets, and everybody walked around the great building, talk- ing and smiling most gracefully. A few of the really devout sat in a small enclosed space in the centre of the church, but they found it hard to keep awake, and their eyes were red with weeping, not for the sins of an evil world, but from opening and shutting their jaws in a series of yawns. Just before the hour of midnight, comparative quiet ensued with the reading of a solemn prayer or two, but just as the most reverend father who was conducting the ceremonies finished bowing behind the high gold and velvet collar to his glittering gown, thirteen bells wagged their tongues that broke up the stillness of the midnight, and everybody wished everybody else " Felices Pascuas ! " (Merry Cluist- mas !) The organ tuned up, the boy-choir sang itself red, white, and blue, the priestly assistants swung o O O o YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 177 the censors until the chnroh was heavy with fra- grance, and all those who had nothing else to do yawned and wished they were in bed. After staying a little longer, our party left, and went over to the Jesuit Church near by, where a Yerj good orchestra seemed to be playing a Virginia reel. Here were similar ceremonies modified somewhat to suit the rather different requirements of the Order, and after staying long enough not to appear as in- truding spectators, we made oui" exit. And now that Christmas is all over, everybody seems to be wearing a new hat, the most appropriate present that can be given in this land of sun-strokes and fevered brows. January 5th. The new year has come and gone, though out this way no one believes in turning over a new leaf. It seems to be a custom to start the year by calling on all the married ladies of the colony, who make their guests loquacious with sundry little cocktails that stand ready prepared on the front verandas. Everybody makes calls, till he forgets where anything but his head is situated, and then brings up at the club out by the river-bank more or less the worse for wear. In honor of the day, the menu was most attractive, but many of the party were in no condition to partake, and spent the first day of the new calen- 178 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES dar in suffering from the effects of their morning visits. With the new year came the dance, which we bach- elor members of the club gave to the English ladies in particular and to Manila society in general, as a small return for hospitality received, and it was de- clared a huge success. The club-house was decor- ated from top to toe. Two or three hundred invita- tions were sent out, and the creme de la creme of the European population were on hand, including Gen- eral Blanco, the governor of the islands. The English club rarely gives a dance more than once in five years, and when the engraved invitations first appeared there was much talk and hobnobbing among the Spaniards to see who had and who had not been invited. All the greedy Dons who had ever met any of the clubmen expected to be asked, and considered it an insult not to receive an invitation. One high oiScial, who had himself been invited, wrote to the committee seeking an invitation for some friends. As, of course, only a limited number could be accommodated at the club-house, the invitations were strictly limited, and a reply was sent to the Spanish gentleman in question, stating that there were no more invitations to be had. " Do you mean to insult me and my friends ? " he wrote, "by saying that there are no more invitations YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 179 left for them ? Do you mean to say that my friends are not gentlemen, and so you won't ask them? I must insist on an explanation, or satisfaction." For several days before the party one might have heard young women and girls who walked up and down the Luneta talking nothing but dance, and the Spanish society seemed to be divided up into two distinct cliques, the chosen and the uninvited. The chosen proceeded at once to starve themselves and use what superfluous dollars they could collect in buying new gowns at the large Parisian shops ou the Escolta. Most of the Spanish women in Manila can well afford to be abstemious and devote the sur- plus thus obtained to the ornamentation of their per- sons, since they are so fairly stout that the fires of their appetite can be kept going some time after actual daily food-supplies have been cut off. The men, how- ever, seem to be as slender as the women are robust, and they, poor creatures, caimot endure a long fast. Nevertheless, the cash-drawers of the Paris shops got fat as the husbands of the wives who bought new gowns there grew more slender ; and just before the ball came off these merchant princes of the Philippines actually offered to contribute five hundred dollars if another dance should be given within a short time, so great had been the rush of patrons to their attrac- tive counters. 180 TESTBKDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES To make a long story short, after a lot of squab- bles and Avranglings among those who were invited and those who were not, the night of the party came, and only those who held the coveted cards M'ere per- mitted by the giants at the door to enter Paradise. Japanese lanterns lighted the road which led from the main highway to the club, and the old rambling structure was aglow -with a thousand colored cup- lights that made it look like fairyland. Within and without were dozens of palms and aU sorts of tropi- cal shrubs, and the entrance-way was one huge bower-like fernery. Around the lower entrance- room colored flags grouped themselves artistically, and below a huge mass of bunting at the farther end rose the grand staircase that led above. Up- stairs, the ladies' dressing-room was most gorgeous, and the walls were himg with costly, golden-wove tapestries from Japan. The main parlor formed one of the dancing-rooms and opened into two huge ad- joining bed-chambers which were thrown together in one suite. All around the walls and ceilings were gar- lands and long festoons and wreaths, and everywhere were bowers of plants, borrowed mirrors, and lights. Out on the veranda, overhanging the river, were clusters of small tables, glowing under fairy lamps, and the railings were a mass of verdure. The orchestra consisted of twenty-five natives, YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 181 dressed in wliite shirts whose tails were not tucked in, hidden behind a forest of plants, and as the clock struck ten they began to coax from their instruments a dreamy waltz. The guests began to pour in — Spanish dons with their corpulent wives, and strap- ping Englishmen with their leaner better halves. The Spaniards, sniffing the air, all looked longingly toward the supper-rooms, whUe the ladies who came with them ambled toward the powder and paint boxes in the boudoir. I suppose about two hundred people in aU were on hand, and the sight was indeed gay. After every one had become duly hot from dancing or duly himgry from waiting, supper was served, and there was almost a panic as the Spanish element with one accord made for the large room at the extreme other end of the buildiug, where dozens of small tables glistened below candelabra with red shades, and improvised benches groaned under the weight of a great variety of refreshments. Soon the slender caballeros got to look fatter in the face, and the double chins of their ladies grew doubler every moment. Knives, forks, and spoons were all going at once, and talk was suspended. But the room presented a pretty sight, with its fourscore couples sitting around beneath the swaying pun- kahs, and the soft warm light made beauties out of many ordinary-looking persons. 182 TESTERDArS IN THE PHILIPPINES After everybody was satisfied, dancing was re- sumed in the big front rooms on the river, and the gayety went on ; but the heavy supper made many of the foreign guests grow dull, and the cool hours of early morning saw everyone depart, carrying with them or in them food enough for many days. Thus ended the great ball given to balance the debt of hospitahty owed by the bachelors to their married friends, and now will come the committee's collectors for money to pay the piper. Janiiary 31st. Manila has been quite outdoing herself lately, and the gayeties have been numerous. The opening of the Royal Exposition of the PhiHppines took place last week, and was quite as elaborate as the name itself. The Exposition buildings were grouped along the raised ground filled in on the paddy-fields, by the side of the broad avenue that divides our suburb of Malate from that of Ermita, and runs straight back inland from the sea. The architecture is good, the buildings numerous, and with grounds tastefully dec- orated with plants and fountains, it is, in a way, like a pocket edition of the Chicago Exposition. Everybody in town was invited to attend the open ing ceremonies by a gorgeously gotten-up invitation, YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 183 and interesting catalogues of the purpose of the ex- hibition and its exhibits were issued in both Spanish and English. To be sure, the language in the catalogue translated from the Spanish was often ridiculous, and announcements were made of such exhibits as " Collections of hving animals of laboring class," and " tabulated prices of transport terrestrial and submarine." But all of the elite of Manila were on hand at the ceremonies, from the Archbishop and Governor-General down to my coachman's wife, and bands played, flags waved in the fresh breeze, tongues wagged, guns fired, and whistles blew. General Blanco opened the fair with a well-worded speech on the importance of the Philippines, of the debt that the inhabitants owed to the protection of the mother- country, and of the great future predestined for the Archipelago. And just as the speaker had finished and the closing hours of the day arrived, the new electric lights were turned on for the first time. Then all Manila, hitherto illuminated by the dull and dangerous petroleum lamps, shone forth under the radiance of several hundred arc-lights and a couple of thousand incandescent ones. The improvement is tremendous, aud the streets, which have always been dim from an excess of real tropical, visible, feelable, darkness, are now respect- ably illuminated. 184 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES The exposition was opened on the name-day of the little King of Spain, and every house in town was re - quested, if not ordered, to hang out some sort of a flag or decoration. It was said that a fine of $5 would be charged to those who did not garb their shanties in colors of some sort, and all the natives were particular to obey the law. It was indeed instructive, if not pathetic, to see shawls, colored handkerchiefs, red table-cloths, carpets, and even sofa-cushions, hanging out of windows, or on poles from poverty-stricken little nipa huts, and any article with red or yellow in it seemed good enough to an- swer the purpose. We, in turn, were also officially requested to show our colors, and I hung out two bath- wraps from our front window, articles which I had picked up on the recent excursion to Mindanao, and which the wild savages there wear down to the river when they go to wash clothes or themselves. But they likewise had enough red and yellow in their composition to fiU the bill, and, together with five pieces of red flannel from my photographic dark- room, our windows showed a most prepossessing ap- pearance. On the Sunday after the King's name-day, a costly display of fireworks took place off the water, in front of the Luneta, further to celebrate the occasion. The bombs and rockets were ignited from large floats o a: ^ B o O O YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 185 .incliored near the shore, while complicated set- pieces were erected on tall bamboos standing up in the water and bolstered from behind with supports and guy-lines. The exhibition began shortly after dinner, and never had I seen a crowd of such large dimensions before in Manila. There must have been twenty- five thousand people jammed into the near vicinity of the promenade, and a great sea of faces islanded hundreds of traps of all species and genders. The display was excellent, and both of the large military bands backed it up with good music. One of the set pieces was a royal representation of a full- rigged man-of-war carrying the Spanish flag, and she was shown in the act of utterly annihilating an iron-clad belonging to some indefinite enemy. The reflections in the water doubled the beauty of the scene, and with rockets, bombs, mines, parachutes, going up at the same time, there was little intermission to the excitement. Several rockets came down into the crowd, and one alighted on the back of a pony, caus- ing him to start off on somewhat of a tangent. Otherwise there were no disasters, and it was nearly midnight before the great audience scattered in all directions. The electric lights, of course, are of tremendous interest to the more ignorant natives, and every evening finds groups of the latter gathered around the 186 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES posts supporting the arc-lamps, looking upward at the sputtering carbon, or examining the bugs which lose their life in attempting to make closer analyses of the artificial suns. A fresh edition of the opera company has come out again from Italy, and performances are given Tues- days, Thursdays, and Sundays. Everybody, as usual, is allowed behind the scenes during the intermis- sions, and the other evening, in the middle of a most pathetic scene in " Faust," a Yankee skipper, some- what the jollier from a shore dinner, walked directly across the back of the stage and took his hat off to the audience. Episodes like this are hardly common, but in Manila there are not the barriers to the stage- door that exist in the U. S. A. The artiUery-band on the Luneta has several times played the " Wash- ington Post March " which you sent me, and which I gave to the fat, pleasant-faced conductor. The championship games at the tennis-court have begun, and all of the English colony generally assemble there to see the play just before sxmset. Small dinners and dances are also numerous, and the cool weather seems to be incubating gayety. February 22d. Manila is said to have the most complete astronom- ical, meteorological, and seismological observatory anywhere east of the Mediterranean. Not to miss YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 187 anything of such reputation, several of us decided to make a call on Padre Faui-e, who presides over the institution, and who is well known scientifically all over the world. At the observatory we were cordially received by an assistant, who spoke English well enough to turn us off from using Spanish, and were conducted over the establishment. Here were machines which would write do^i^-n the motions of the earth in seismological disturbances, and Avhich conveyed to the ear various subterranean noises going on below the surface. Still other instruments were so delicate that they rang electric bells when mutterings took place far underground, and thus warned the observers of approaching trouble. An- other, into which you could look, showed a moving black cross on a white ground, that danced at aU the slight tremblings continually going on; and the rumbling of a heavy cart over the neighboring high- road would make it tremble with excitement. A soUd tower of rock twenty feet square extended up through the building from bottom to top, and was en- tirely disconnected with the suiToimding stmcture. On this column all of the earthquake-instruments were arranged; and any sort of an oscillation that took place would be recorded in ink on charts arranged for the purpose. Various wires and electric connections were everywhere visible, and an approaching disturb- 188 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES ance would be sure to set enougli bells and tickers a-going to arouse one of the attendants. The great school-building in which the observatory was placed was fully six hundred feet square, with a large court-yard ia the centre containing fountains and tropical plants in profusion. After leaving the lower portions of the building, we ascended through long hallways, to visit the meteorological department above. Barometers, thermometers, wind-gauges, rain- measurers, and all sorts of recording instruments filled a most interesting room ; and Padre Faurc gave us a long discourse on typhoons, earthquakes, and various other phenomena. From the roof of the observatory a splendid view of the city. Bay, and adjacent coun- try may be had, and Manila lay before us steaming in the sun. Before leaving, we saw the twenty-inch telescope, constructed in Washington under the di- rection of the Padre who was our guide, Avhich is soon to be installed in a special building constructed for the purpose. He seemed much impressed by the United States, and at our departure presented us with one of the monthly observatory reports, which give the whole story of the movements of the earth, winds, heavens, tides, stars, and clouds, at every hour of the day and night, for every day during the month, and for every month during the year. Last Monday was again the usual bank-holiday; TESTEEDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 189 and on the Saturday before, the customary three of us who seem to be more energetic at seeing the coun- try than our friends, decided to take another excur- sion up the river iuto the hill-country. In the forenoon we gave orders to the boys to get ready the provisions, and meet us at the club-house in the early afternoon. Our plan was to take one of the light randans irom the boat-house, row up the river for twelve or fifteen miles, take carromatas up into the hills to a place called Antipolo, and finally to horseback it over the mountains to Bossa Bossa, a lonely hUl village, ten miles farther on. The time came. All of our goods and chattels were piled into the boat. We took off white coats, put on our big broad-brimmed straw hats, turned up our trouserloons, and prepared for a long row up against the current. But, thanks to Providence, we were able to hitch onto one of the stone-lighters that regularly bring rock down from the lake district, for use on the new breakwater and port-works at Manila, and which was being towed up for more supplies. The sun got lower and lower, and finally set, just as the moon rose over the mountains. The sail in the soft light of evening was very picturesque, and the banks were lined with the usual collection of native huts, in front of which groups of natives were either washing clothes or themselves. Large freight cascos or small hancas 190 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES were either being poled up-stream by heated boat- men, or were drifting lazily down with the current, and everywhere a sort of indolent attractiveness pre- vailed. "We continued on behind the lighter until al- most at the lake itseK ; then cast adrift and branched off into a small side-stream that ran up toward the hUls ia a northerly direction. On we wound, now between a deep fringe of bam- boo-trees, now between open meadows, now be- tween groups of thatched huts, and again through clumps of fish-weirs, coming at last to a town called Cainta, nearly an hour's row from the main stream. We stopped beneath an old stone bridge that carried the main turnpike to Manila from the mountains, and were greeted by all the towns-people, who were out basking in the moonlight. They had evidently never seen a boat of the randan type before, and expressed much curiosity at the whole equipment. Before many moments the governor of the village appeared in the background and asked us to put up at his residence. Ten willing natives seized upon our goods and chat- tels, others pulled the boat up on the sloping bank, and we adjourned to the small thatched house where lived our host. The Filipinos gathered around out- side, the privileged ones came ia, and everybody stared. The governor did everything for our amuse- ment ; called in singing-girls, with an old chap whq YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 191 played on the guitar, and otherwise arranged for our entertainment. At eleven he said " Shoo " and everybody left. His wife gave us pieces of straw matting to sleep on, and we stretched out upon one of those familiar floors of bamboo slats which make one feel like a pair of rails on a set of cross-ties. Later the family all turned in on the floor in the same manner, and soon the cool night-wind was whistling up through the apertures. Next morning, Sunday, a hot dusty ride of an hour and a half, over a fearful road, continually ascending, brought us to Antipolo, a stupid village commanding a grand view over the plains toward Manila and the Bay beyond. To fijid out where we cotild get ponies to take us over the rough foot-path to Bossa Bossa, we called at the big convento where live the priests who officiate at the great white church, whose tower is visible from the capital. Mass was just over, but the stone corridors reverberated with loud jestings and the click of bUliard-baUs above. On going up- stairs, we broke in upon a group of padres playing billiards, drinking beer, smoking cigars, and cracking jokes ad libitum. They received us cordially, did not seem inclined to talk much on religious subjects, but advised us where we might find the necessary horseflesh. Not so much imj)ressed with their spirit- uality as with their courtesy, wo left, got three ponies 192 TESTEEDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES and two carriers, and started out for the ride over the mountains. The path was narrow and steep, the sun was hot, but the scenery was good. On and up we went, until the view back and down over the lower country be- came most extensive. Across brooks, over stones, through gullies, and over trees carried us to the last rise, and after passing through a grove of mangoes we came to the edge of the ridge. Down below, in a fair little valley that looked like a big wash-basin, lay Bossa Bossa, a small collection of houses shut- ting in a big church without any steeple. Squarely up behind, on the other side of the valley, rose the lofty peaks of the Cordilleras, and the scene was good enough for the most critical. On descending to the isolated little pueblo, we got accommodation in the best house of the place, belong- ing to the native Governor, and adjourned for rest and refreshments. All we had left to eat in our baskets were two cold chickens, three biscuits, and four bottles of soda. We sent out for more food, and in half an hour a boy came back with the only articles that the market afforded — two cocoanuts. The house in which we were seemed to be the only one in town that possessed a chair, and, as it was, we found it more comfortable to sit on the floor. This was the centre of the great hunting-district, and all around in ^"J^*S*?5^^***^?S*<=»M' A Half Caste. The Little Flower-girl at the Opera. See page )6. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 193 tlie hills and mountains deer and wild boar were abundant. During the following night it got so cold that it was possible to see one's breath, and without coverings as we were, the whole party dreamed of arctic circles and polar bears. At daylight next morning, numb with the cold, we sat down to a breakfast con- sisting of carabao milk and hard bread made of pounded-rice flour, and felt pretty fairly well removed from tropics and civilization. The old church, which we could see out of the window, stood in a small plaza, and the steeple, which consisted of four tall posts covered by a small roof of thatch that protected a group of bells from the morning dew, was off by itself in a corner of the churchyard. A long clothes- line seemed to lead from the bells to a native house across the street, and we learned that the sexton was accustomed to lie in bed and ring the early morning chimes by wagging his right foot, to which the string was attached. On the return trip we met a large party of hunters coming up from Manila for a week's deer-shooting, and by noon got back to Antipolo, where we rested in the police-station to wait for our carromatas that were to arrive at one o'clock. The return to Cainta was as hot and dusty as the advance, but we were pleasantly received by our friend the governor, who had instructed the " boys" to 194 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES have tlie refreshments ready for us. Later in the afternoon, we prepared to return to the metropolis, and the whole village came down to see us off. The governor refused to accept money for the use of his house, we were all invited to come again, and amid a chorus of cheers we shoved off for Manila. The row down took only three hours, but on getting to the club, at moonrise, it seemed as if we had been away three weeks. Exacting Harbor Regulations — The Eleanor takes Frencii Leave — Loss of the Gravina — Something about the Native Ladies — Ways of Native Servants — A Sculptor who was a Dentist — Across the Bay to Oiani— Children in Plenty — A Public Execution by the Garrote. AprU 19tli. If a ship in the Bay desires to load or discharge cargo on Sundays or religious holidays, permission can only be obtained through the Archbishop, not the Governor-General. The Easter season has come and gone, and as the Captain of the Esmeralda could not successfully play on the feelings of that highest dignitary of the church, his steamer had to lie idle for the holidays, and so miss connecting with the Peking, which ought to have taken the United States mail. The American yacht Eleanor di'opped anchor in the Bay the other afternoon, and it seemed good again to see the countenances of some of our countrymen. It appears the Spanish officials did not consent to treat her with the courtesy which a yacht or war-ship mer- its, and went so far as to station carabineros on her decks, as is customary on merchant-vessels to prevent 195 196 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES smuggling. The Eleanor presented a fine appear- ance as she lay among the fleet of more prosaic craft, and her rails were decorated with Gatling guns put there for the voyage up through the southern archi- pelagoes where pirates reign. On the Wednesday before Holy Thursday, the owner of the Eleanor decided to start for Hong Kong, that his guests might enjoy Easter Sunday in those more civilized districts that surround the English cathedral. The yacht, like any merchantman, was obliged to get her clear- ance papers from the custom-house before she sailed, and to that end the Captain went ashore shortly after midday. But the chief of the harbor office had gone home for a siesta, remarking that he would not return until Monday, and that any business coming up would have to wait till then for attention. " But I must have my papers," said the Captain, " for we leave to-night for China." "Them you cannot have till Monday," replied the hireling in charge. "Then I shall have to sail without them," an- swered the Captain, and he stormed out of the office to find our consul, whom he hoped would straighten matters out. But the efforts of the consul were of no avail. The king-pin of the harbor office refused to be interviewed, and the Captain of the yacht returned aboard with fire in his eye. After a council of war YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 197 had been held, it was decided to sail, papers or no papers, and the two soldiers who were pacing up and down the deck were told the vessel was going to sea. " But we won't let you go without your papers," said they. " Papers or no papers, we are going to sea to-night," roared the Captain. " And if you fellows don't git aboard into that boat mighty quick, we'll be feeding you to the sharks." The Gatling guns and show of rifles in the com- panion-way looked eloquent, and the two carabineros, murmuring that they would surely be killed for neg- lect of duty when they got ashore, were pushed down the gangway into a row-boat as the Elea- nor got her anchor up, and steamed out of the Bay in the face of Providence and the southwest wind, almost across the bows of the Spanish flagship Eeina Cristina. A tremendous diplomatic hullabaloo resulted. The consul was summoned, the guards were blown up by the discharge of verbal powder, and it almost looked as if our representative would have to send for war-ships. But the matter has finally been straightened out, and the passengers on the Eleanor have probably had their Easter Sunday at Hong Kong. Curiously enough, for April, another typhoon has recently sailed through the gap in the mountains to 198 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES the nortli of our capital, and gone swirling over to CMna, leaving in its wake a sunken steamer, which foundered with her living freight of close to three hundred souls. Out in front of tlie big steamship office across the way hundreds of natives are inquir- ing for their brothers or husbands or children. It seems the Gravina, a ship of the best part of a thousand tons, was coming down from the north, heavily loaded with rice, tobacco, and native boys, who, for not paying their tax bills, had been drafted into service for the purpose of being sent against the savages in Mindanao. She had only fifty more miles to go before reaching the entrance to Manila Bay, when the barometer fell, the wind hauled to the northwest, and the typhoon struck her. Her after- hatchway was washed overboard, and, deep in the water as she was, the seas washed over into the open- ing. As fast as fresh coverings were substituted they were ripped off and carried away. The engines became disabled, the water rushed into the boiler- room, putting out the fires, and the passengers, who were locked into the cabins, were panic-stricken. The steamer began to settle, and under the onslaught of a big sea, accompanied with terrific wind, suddenly heeled over and foundered with all on board, save three, the Captain standing on the bridge as she went down, crying "Viva Espafla." Two natives and a YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 199 Spanish woman got clear of the ship before she sucked them under, and floated about on an awning- pole and a deck-table. Scarcely had the survivors got clear of one danger before a shark swooped down on the Spanish woman, and, attracted by her lighter color, bit off a limb. He paid no attention to the two natives kicking out their feet near by, and, though neither of them could swim a stroke, they managed to paddle ashore on their supports, after being in the water two nights and a day. These two men, the only survivors of the large passenger-Ust of the Gravina, came into our oflSce yesterday, and, after giving a graphic description of the catastrophe, easily got us to loosen our purse- strings. The accident is the worst that has occurred for many a day, and there is a gloom over the whole city. The newspapers came out with black borders, and many families are bereaved. May 20th. The more I see of these native servants, the more I appreciate that they are great fabricators and ex- cuse-makers. Your boy, for example, every now and then wants an advance of five or ten dollars on his salary. His father has just died, he tells you, and he needs the money to pay for the saying of a mass for the repose of his soul. Then comes another boy, who says that by his sister's marrying somebody or other 200 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES his aunt has become his grandmother, and he wants cinco pesos, to buy her a present of a fighting-cock or something else. This matter of relationship here in the Phihppines is a most delicate one to keep control of, and in the matter of deaths, births, and marriages among your servants' relations it is very essential that you keep an accurate list of the family tree, so that you may check up any tendency on their part to kill off their fathers and mothers more than twice or three times during the year for the pm-poses of self-aggrandizement. As an example of this, my own boy actually had the cheek to ask me for the loan of a dozen dollars to arrange for the repose of the soul of one of his relatives I had once before assisted him to bury. I seem to have gone a long way in my chronicles without speaking much of the native " ladies " in Ma- nila, and I owe them an apology. But one of them the other day so swished her long pink calico traiu in front of a pony that was cantering up to the club with a carromata in which two of us were seated, that we were dumped out into a muddy rice-field by the wayside. So the apology should be mutual. The costumes worn by the women are far from simple and are made up of that brilliant skirt with long train that is swished around and tucked into the belt in front, the short white waist that, at times divorced YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 201 from the skirt below, has huge flaring sleeves of pina fibre which show the arms, and the costly pina hand- kerchief which, folded on the diagonal, encircles the neck. They wear no hats, often go without stockings, and invariably walk as if they were caiTying a pail of water on their heads. They generally chew betel- nuts, which color the mouth an ugly red, smoke cigars, and put so much cocoanut-oil on their straight, black hair that it is not pleasant to get to leeward of them in an open tram-car. Otherwise they are gen- erally the mothers of many children and often play well on the harp. I made a call on the local dentist yesterday, and found him sitting on a wooden figm-e of St. Peter, carving some expression into the face. I thought I had got into a carpenter's shop instead of a den- tal establishment, and apologized for the intrusion. But the gentleman said he was the dentist, and dropped his mallet and chisel to usher me into his other operatiag-room. It is quite a jump from carv- ing out features of apostles to filling teeth, but on being assured that he had received due instruction from an American dentist, I allowed him to proceed to business. The whole operation lasted about seven and one-half minutes, and by the time I had got out my dollar to pay him for the filling I swallowed soon after, he was again at work on Biblical subjects. 202 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES All in all it doesn't pay to neglect one's health in the Philippines, for the only English doctor that Manila boasts of has been here so long that the cli- mate has shrivelled up his memory. After he has attended your serious case of fever or influenza for several days, he ■wiU suddenly stroll in some morning and give you a sinking feeling with the words : " Oh, by the way, what is the matter with you ? " This is hardly comforting to one who considers himself a gone coon, but in justice to our friend the medico, I must say he never displays these symptoms to patients whose case is really getting desperate. Tons and tons of water have been drunk up by the clouds of late, and have just now begun to be unceremoniously dumped down upon flat Manila, so that she has seemed likely to be washed into the sea. But rain has been badly needed. A long heat has made many the worse for wear, and the doctors have all said that unless the raia came soon, an epi- demic would probably break out. Before the showers began, we improved the spare time of another Sunday and bank-holiday by an aquatic excursion to some of the provincial towns away across to the north side of Manila Bay. Don Capitan, the purchaser of our fire-engine and the mil- lionaire ship-owner who runs several lines of steamers and storehouses, was our host, and invited us to spend in YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 203 the days as his guests aboard the trim paddle-wheel steamer that makes regular trips to the bay ports. Early on Sunday morning we started from the quay in front of the big hemp -press, and while the lower decks of the steamer were crowded with native mar- ket-women, fishermen, and Chinese, the more sightly portions of the upper promenade were reserved for us and provided with Vienna chairs. Breakfast was served in a large chart-room connected with the wheel- house, and was a fitting accompaniment to the fresh sail out of the river through the shipping. After discharging groups of passengers and freight into large tree-trunk boats at several little villages, we came at noon to Orani, the end of the outward run. The sister-in-law of the jet-black captain owned the largest house in the village, and put it at our disposal. Our advent had been heralded the day before, and a groaning table supported a sumptuous repast. There were four of us besides the half-caste family of the captain's sister-in-law, and an old withered-up Spaniard who used to be governor of the village. Various cats roamed around rmder the table, and on top were toothpicks built up into cones, Spanish sausages, olives, flowers, and fruit with an unpro- nounceable name, that looked like freshly dug pota- toes well covered with soil. Beside each chair was a red clay jar, into which 204 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES each participator in the repast could from time to time transfer such articles as were apparently unswal- lowable, and all around stood thick-lipped serving boys, who looked as if they were only waiting to pom- soup in one's lap, or garlic gravy down one's neck. The feast began with soup, and though the family could not well eat that with their knives, they could the re- maining courses. After soup came the pucJiero, that mixture of beans, potatoes, cabbage, tough meat, pork, grass, garlic, and grease, and I steeled myself for the fray. Next came cooked hen with a limpid gravy accompaniment, and as the chicken had been alive up to within a few moments of going into the kettle, the question of attack was difficult. Then fol- lowed in succession cow's tongue and roast goat, fish, salad with sliced tomatoes, and dessert consisting of those fluify affairs made of sugar and eggs which taste like captivated sea-foam. As is always custom- ary, cheese and fruit were served together, but while a servant had to carry the fruit, the cheese seemed inclined to walk around by itself. In due season all the debris was removed. A boy went in pursuit of the cheese and the table was cleared for strong coffee that looked dangerous. The mortal- ity, however, among the party was not great, and aU those who were able to get up from the table went to take a siesta. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 205 At about four, we were awakened by the familiar noise coming from the grinding of an ice-cream freez- er, and afternoon tea, consisting of chocolate, sand- wiches, cakes and frozen pudding, was served half an hour later. At five we were to take a drive along the shore in the only two landaus that the place possessed, and since the padre who lived close by in the big church had been good enough to lend us one, we called on him in state, taking with us, for his refresh- ment, a small caldron of ice-cream. His greeting was right cordial, and after amusing us with stories of his many adventures, told in fluent English, he dismissed us with his blessing. Two of our party got into his carriage, while other two went in that belonging to the governor of the town, and behind smart-stepping ponies we bowled off up the road that led west along the Bay. Old Malthus would have been interested to see the number of children that exist in these provincial villages, and it really seemed as if at least one hundred and two per cent, of the population were kids. About eighteen infants could be seen leaning out of every window, in every native hut, and in the streets, by- ways, and hedges they were thick as locusts. Most of these children trailed little else than clouds of glory, since clothes were scarce and expensive. An undershirt was all that any of them seemed to wear, 206 YESTEKDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES and only tlie dudes of the one hundred and two per cent, wore that. Much to our amusement, the loiterers by the way- side everywhere saluted us with a " Buenos tardea, Padre," and it appeared that since the holy father is the only one who drives regularly in a landau, the whole population thought of coux'se we must be he, or some of his saiatly brethren. And so we went until the gathering darkness compelled a return to the start- ing-point. An elaborate supper, consisting of hard- shelled crabs and other indigestibles, was followed by an impromptu dance and musicale, and the even- ing ended in a burst of song. Next morniQg the little steamer took us and a load of fish and vegetables back to the capital. July 6tli. Our modern journals, I know, rejoice to go into all the gruesome details of crime and its punishment, and many of their readers take as much morbid pleasure in poring over accounts of hangings, pictures of the culprit, diagrams of his cell, and last conversations with the jailer, as do the reporters in getting the in- formation with which to make up long, padded articles paid for by the column. I am not morbidly curious myself, and trust you will not think I went to see the capital punishment of two murderers for any other than purely scientific reasons. TESTEKDATS IN THE PHILIPPINES 207 The two men who were executed on July 4th, just passed, were conYicted of chopping a Spaniard to pieces to get the few dollars which he kept in his house, and to avenge themselves for harsh. treatment. They were nothing more than native boys, one twenty and the other twenty-two, employed as servants in the family of the unfortunate victim. In short, they were sentenced to death by the garrote, and to the end of carrying out the decree a platform was erected in the open parade-ground behind the Luneta. But the people in the neighborhood objected. The women said they could not sleep from thinking over it, and could not bear to have their children see the scaffold. General Blanco was petitioned, and the place of ex- ecution was changed to a broad avenue that leads down through the back part of Manila, by the public slaughter-house. Surely the selection was appro- priate. On the fatal day, my colleague and I drove to the scene shortly after sunrise, and crowds of people had already begun to come together from the adjoining districts. Carriages of all classes rolled in from all directions. Chinamen with cues, natives with their wives, women with their infants, young girls and children, old men and maidens, were all there, dressed in their best clothes. I knew it would be useless to stand in the crowd, 208 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES SO I pushed over toward a nipa hut, whose windows, which were filled with natives, looked fairly out on the scaffold itself. In the name of my camera I asked admittance, which was cordially accorded, since we were "Ingleses," and on going to the upper floor we had a free view over the crowd below toward the fatal platform, with its two posts to which were at- tached two narrow seats. The crowd increased ; they climbed into bamboo-trees, which bent to the ground ; they tried to surge up on the lower framework of the house in which we were standing, and only desisted as the proprietress slashed the encroachers right and left mth a bamboo-cane. The roofs of neighboring houses were black with people, the windows swarmed, and the street below heaved. Our hostess was pleas- ant, though fiery, and all she wanted in return for our admission was a photograph of herself. The favor was granted, and she gave us two chairs to sit in. The crowd increased, and the guards had hard work keeping back the struggling mass. Every avail- able square inch of space was filled, and a sea of heads pulsated before us. At last, cries of " aqui vienen" (here they come) arose, and the solemn procession came into view after its long journey from the central jail, over a mile away. First came the cavaby, then a group of priests, among whom marched a man wearing an YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 209 apron, carrying the sacred banner of the Church, embroidered in black and gold. Next marched the prison oificials, and behind them came two small, open tip-carts, drawn by ponies, in which travelled the condemned men, each supported by a couple of priests who held crucifixes before their eyes, exhort- ing them to confess and believe. Following the carts, which were surrounded by a square of soldiers, walked the executioner himself, a condemned criminal, but spared from being exe- cuted by his choosing to accept the office of public executioner. Last of all came a small company of soldiers, with bayonetted guns, and the whole pro- cession advanced to the foot of the steps leading to the platform. The garroting instrument seems to consist of a col- lar of brass, whose front-piece opens on a hinge, and part of whose rear portion is susceptible to being suddenly pushed forward by the impulse of a big fourth-rate screw working through the post, some- thing after the system of a letter-press. The criminal sentenced to death is seated on a small board attached to the upright, his neck is placed in the brass collar, the front-piece is snapped to, and when all is ready, the executioner merely gives the handle of the screw a complete turn. The small moving back-piece in the collar is by this means suddenly pushed forward 210 TESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES against the top of the spine of the unfortunate, and death comes instantaneously from the snapping of the spinal cord. The executioners in Manila have always been them- selves criminals, and in breaking the spinal cords of their fellow-criminals, they certainly pay a price for keeping their own vertebroB intact. Like most men in their profession, however, they are well paid, and this operator got sixteen dollars besides his regular monthly salary of twenty, for each man on whom he turned the screw. The sight of the unfortunate prisoners in the little carts, supported by the priests, was pitiable in the extreme, and their faces bore marks of unforgetable anguish. The priests ascended the platform, and the man with the embroidered banner was careful to stand far away at the side, for, according to the re- ligious custom of the epoch, a condemned man who merely happens to touch the standard of the Church on his way to the scaffold cannot thereafter be ex- ecuted, but suffers only life imprisonment. The executioner, in a derby hat, black coat, white breeches, and no shoes, took his position behind the post at one side of the scaffold, and the first vic- tim was carried up out of the cart and seated on the narrow bench. He was too weak to help himself or make resistance ; the black cloak was thrown over his The Fourth of July, '95- Execution by the Garrote. ' My watch stopped and the cord-pull to my camera broke just as the screw was turned on the first man to be executed." See page 212. YESTERDAYS IKT THE PHILIPPINES 211 shoulders, a rope tied around his waist, the hood drawn down over his face, and the collar sprung around his neck. Then, while two priests, with un- covered heads, held their crucifixes up before him, and sprinkled holy water over the hood and long, black death-robes, the chief prison official waved his sword, the executioner gave the big screw-handle a sudden twist till his arms crossed, and without a mo- tion of any sort, except a slight forward movement of the naked feet, the first of the condemned men had solved the great problem. The second poor wretch all the while cowered in the little cart, but when his turn came he ascended the steps with more fortitude. After he had put on the long black gown and hood, he seated himself on the bench at the second post and the same process was repeated. But the screw-thread seemed to be rusty, and one of the native officials helped the exe- cutioner give the handle an additional turn, for which he was promptly fined $20. The doctor tarried a few moments on the scaffold, the priests read several prayers and shook holy water over the immovable black-robed figures wedded to the posts, and then, after one of the acolytes had nearly set fire to the flowing gown of the head padl,re with his long can- dle, everyone descended. The remnants of the procession returned to the 212 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES prison, the troops stationed themselves in a large hollow square around the scaffold, and two dark, motionless figures locked to two posts were left in the hot sun till noon, set out against the blue back- ground of sky and clouds. The crowds began to disperse, the young girls chatted and joked with each other, the curious were satisfied, and the bamboo-trees were left to lift their heads at leisure. Thus began Manila's Fourth of July, and curi- ously enough, my watch stopped and the cord-pull to my instantaneous camera broke just as the screw ' was turned on the first man to be executed. XI Lottery Chances and Mischances — An American Cig:arette-Makingf Machine and its Fate— Closing up Business— How the Foreigner Feels Toward Life in Manila — Why the EngUsh and Germans Return — Restlessness among the Natives— Their Persecution — Departure and Farewell. August 25th. I LOST $80,000 yesterday. Perhaps I have spoken of lottery tickets, but haye failed to say what an important institution in Manila the "Loteria Na- cional " really is. Drawings come each month over in the Lottery Building in Old Manila, and every- body is invited to inspect the fairness with which the prize-balls drop out of one revolving cylinder like a peanut-roaster while the ticket-number balls slide out of the other. The Government runs the lot- tery to provide itself with revenue, and starts off by putting twenty-five per cent, of the value of the ticket-issue into its own coffers. If all the tickets are not sold, the Loteria Nacional keeps the bal- ance for itself and promptly pockets whatever prizes those tickets draw. Lottery tickets are everywhere, in every window, and urchins of all sizes and gen- ders moon about the streets selling little twentieths 213 214 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES to sucli as haven't the ten dollars to buy a whole one. Guests at dinner play cards for lottery tickets paid for by the losers, Englishmen bet lottery tickets that the Esmeralda won't bring the mail from home, and natives dream of lucky numbers, to go searching all over town for the pieces that bear the figures of their visions. Four months ago I got reckless enough to plank $10 on the counter of the little shop, which, at the corner of the Escolta and the Puente de Espana, is said to dispense the largest number of winning tickets, and became the owner of number 1700. It sounded too even, too commonplace, to be lucky, but as it was considered unlucky to change a ticket once handed you, I trudged off and locked the paper in the safe. The drawing came, and 1700 drew $100. Fortune seemed bound my way, so I made arrange- ments (as so many buyers of lucky tickets do) to keep 1700 every month. My name was put in the paper as holding 1700, and for three long months I remem- bered to send my servant to the Government office ten days before the drawing, for the ticket reserved in my name. But for three drawings it never tempted for- tune. Last week I forgot lottery and everything else in our further struggle with a new piece of American machinery which was being introduced for the first time to Manila, and woke up to-day to find it the YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 215 occasion of the drawing. My ticket — uncalled for — had been sold. At noon I walked by the little tienda whose proprietor had first given me the fatal number, to see him perched up on a step-ladder, posting up the big prizes, as fast as they came to his wife by telephone. The space opposite the first prize of $80,000 was empty. His wife handed him a paper. Into the grooves he slid a figure 1, then a 7, and then two ciphers. Ye gods — my ticket! The capital prize — not mine ! $80,000 lost because I forgot — and to thiak that the whole sum would have been paid in hard, jingling coin, for which I should have had to send a dray orstwo ! But I am not quite so inconsolable as my friends the two Englishmen, who kept their ticket for two years, and at last, dis- couraged, sold it, Chrismas-eve, to a native clerk, only to wake up next day and find it had drawn $100,000. They have never been the same since. Nor have I. And the machine that caused all the trouble — an- other whim of our rich friend, the owner of the fire- engine, who saw from the catalogues on our office table that American cigarette-machines could turn out 125,000 pieces a day against some 60,000, the capacity of the French mechanisms, which were in use in all the great factories in ManUa. He wanted one for his friend that ran the little tobacco-mill up in 216 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES a back street, for whom be furnished the capital. If it worked, be was in the market for two dozen more, and vowed to knock spots out of the big Compaiiia General and Fabrica Insular. Out came our machine some weeks ago, and with it two skilled machinists to make it work. The big companies pricked up their ears and appeared clear- ly averse to seeing an American article introduced, which should outclass the French machiues for which they had contracted. One morning the two machinists came to our office and handed us an anonymous note which had been thrust imder the door of their room at the Hotel Oriente : " Stop your work — it will be better for you." It was perhaps not diplomatic, but we told them the story of the two Protestant missionaries who some years before came to ManUa and attempted to preach their doctrines in the face of Catholic disapproval. One morning they found a piece of paper beneath their door in the same hotel, reading : " Tou are warned to desist your preaching." Paying no attention to the warning, they woke up two sunrises later on to find another note beneath the door: " Stop your work and leave the city, or take the consequences." YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 217 Still they heeded not ; and a third paper under the door, some days later, read : " For the last time you are warned to leave. Heed this and beware of neglect to do so." But, like Christian soldiers, they were only the more zealous in their work. In two days more they were found dead in their rooms — poisoned. Our friends, the engineers, were not soothed by a relation of these facts, but kept on with their work. In three days they, too, got a second warning : "Leave your work and go away by the first steamer." Things began to look serious, and the more timid mechanic of the two could hardly be restrained from buying a ticket to Hong Kong. When, however, in two more days, a third piece of yellow paper was slipped into their rooms, bear- ing the pencilled words, " For the last time you are told to take the next steamer," the matter assumed such proportions that we arranged to have them see the Archbishop, whose knowledge is far-reaching and whose power complete. The letters were sud- denly stopped and the work on the machine carried to a successful completion. Then came the day of trial, and invitations were extended to interested persons to view the operation. 218 YKSTEKDAYS IN THE PHILlFi'INES The machine was started, and the cigarettes began to sizzle out at the rate of nearly two hundred to the minute. But scarcely had the run begun before there was a sudden jar, several of the important parts gave way, and the machine was a wreck. It had been tam- pered with, and it was evident that the instigators of the anonymous letters had taken this more effective means of stopping competition. The parts could not be made in Manila ; America was far away, and our two machinists have just gone home in disgust. Is it a wonder that I forgot the lottery drawing ? Somehow there are currents of trouble in the air, and some of the old residents say they wouldn't be surprised to see the outbreak of a revolution among the natives. Peculiar night-fires have been seen now for some time, burning high up on the mountain- sides and suddenly going out. There seems to be some anti-American sentiment among the powers that be, and only last week matters came to a crisis by the Government putting an embargo on the busi- ness of one of the largest houses here, in which an American is a partner. Smuggled silk was discov- ered coming ashore at night, supposedly from the Esmeralda, and as that steamer was consigned to the firm in question, the authorities demanded pay- ment of a fine of $30,000. Oiu- friends refused, the YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 219 officials closed the doors of their counting-room, our consul cabled to Japan for war-ships again, the Gov- ernor-General read the telegram, hasty summons were given to the parties concerned, heated arguments fol- lowed, and the matter was finally smoothed over on the surface. But there seems to be a distinct feeling against us, and we have been instructed from home to prepare to leave — making arrangements to turn our business into the hands of an English firm, who will act as agents after our departure. September 20th. The cable has come, and we hope by next month to leave this land of intrigue and iniquity. It has treated me well, but complications are daily appear- ing in the business world, and if we get away without suddenly being dragged into some civil dispute it will be delightful. I am glaid to have been here these two years nearly, but it is time to thicken up one's blood again in cooler climes, and I feel these fair islands are no place for the permanent residence of an American. We seem to be like fish out of water here in the Far East, and as few in numbers. The Englishman and the German are everywhere, and why shouldn't they be? Their home-roosts are too small for them to perch upon, and they are bom with the instinct to fly from their nests 220 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES to some foreign land. But, America is so big tliat we ought not to feel called upon to swelter in the tropics amid the fevers and the ferns, and I, for one, am content to " keep off the grass " of these distant foreign colonies. The Englishman or German comes out here on a five-years' contract, and generally runs up a debit bal- ance the first year that keeps him busy economizing the other four. At the end of his first season, he wishes he were at home. At the end of the second, he has exhausted all the novelties of the new situa- tion. At the close of the third, he has settled down to humdrum life. At the end of the fourth, he has become completely divorced from home habits and modern ideals. And at the close of the fifth, he goes home a true Filipino, though thinking all the while he is glad to get away. He says he is never coming back, but wiser heads know better. He has heard about America, and goes home via the States, to see Niagara and New York. But his first laundry-bill in San Francisco so scatters those depreciated silver " Mex- icans," which have lost half their value in being turned into gold, that he takes the fast express to the Atlan- tic coast, and leaves our shores by the first steamer. At home, his friends have all got married or had appendicitis, and the bustle of London, the raw rain- storms of the cold weather and the conventionality of ca ^ O) -ft. YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 221 life all bring up memories of the Philippines, which now seem to lie off there in the China Sea surrounded by a halo. And so, before a year is out, he renews his contract, and at the end of a twelvemonth goes sailing back Manilaward to take up the careless life where he left it, and grow old in the Escolta or the Luneta. In London he paid his penny and took the 'bus, he lived in a dingy room, and packed his own bag. But in Manila, with no more outlay, he owns his horse and carriage, he lives in a spacious bungalow with many rooms, and he lets his servants wait on him by inches. How do I know? Oh, because we've talked it all over, now that our turn for departure comes next. The whisperings of a restlessness among the na- tives continue, and it is hard to see why indeed they do not rise up against their persecutors, the tax-gath- erers and the guardia civil. Ten per cent, of their average earnings have to go to pay their poll-taxes, and if they cannot produce the receipted biUs from their very pockets on any avenue or street-comer, to the challenge of the veterana, they are hustled off to the cuartel, and you are minus your dinner or your coachman. Once in the hands of the law, they are then drafted into the native regiments for operations against those old enemies, the Moros, in the fever- gtricken districts of Mindanao, and their wives or fam^ 222 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES ilies are left to swallow Spanish reglamientos. They have not forgotten their brothers, who, dragged down from the north, went to the bottom in the typhoon which pushed the Gravina down. They have not for- gotten the execution in the public square. They re- member that the Spaniards address them with the servile pronoun "tu," not "usted," and some day they may remember not to forget. They are not quarrel- some, but they are treacherous ; they are not fighters, but when they run amuck they kill right and left. They do not seem to have many wants save to be left alone, to be able to shake a cocoanut from the palm for their morning's meal, or to collect the shakings from a thousand trees and ship them to Manila ; to collect the few strands of fibre to sew the nipa thatch to the frame of their bamboo roof, or to gather enough to fill a schooner for the capital ; in fact, to be able to work or not to work, and to know that the results of their labor are to be theirs, not somebody else's. But what has all this got to do with our hegira ? These last days have been replete with the labors attendant on breaking camp before the long march. Clearings out of furniture, selling one's ponies and carriages, closing up of books, shipping of one's cases and curios on those hemp-ships that are to start on the long 20,000-mile voyage to Boston, and trying to think of the things that have been left undone, or YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 223 ought to be done, have all gone to make the season a busy one. Now that it has come down to actually leaving Manila, I begin to feel the home sickness that comes from tearing one's self away from the midst of friends and a congenial life. I shall miss the hearty Eng- lishmen with whom I rowed or played tennis or went into the country. I shall miss the servants who got so little for making life the easier. I shall miss the ponies, the dogs with the black tongues, and the cats with the crooks in their tails ; the big fire-engine which we used to run, and which has now been var- nished over to save trouble in cleaning ; the Luneta, with its soft breezes and good music ; the walks out on to the long breakwater to see the sunset, and the hob- nobbing with the old salts from the ships in the bay, who called our office the little American oasis in the midst of a great desert of foreign houses. But the clock has struck, and the Esmeralda ought early next month to start us on the forty-day voyage back to God's country. October 23d. Is this sleep, or not sleep ? Is it reaUty or fancy? Am I laboring under a hallucination, a weird phan- tasmagoria, or are my powers of appreciation, my efferent nerve-centres and their connecting links, my sum total of receptive faculties, doing their duty ? I 224 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES feel hypnotized. I kick myself to see if this is real, and am only led to conclude it is by looking into my sewing-kit, where the needles are rusty, the thread gone, and the depleted stock of suspender-buttons wrongly shoved into the partition labelled "piping- cord." I never did know what piping-cord was. My socks are holy, my handkerchiefs have burst in tears, and my liogerie in general looks as if it had been used for a Chinese ensign on one of the ships that fought in the naval battle of the Yalu. For two years those garments have held together under the peculiar processes of PhiUppuie laundering, but now that barbarians have once more got hold of them and subjected them to modern treatment, they recognize the enemy and go to pieces. And so the condition of my clothes leads me to believe I am awake, although everything else suggests the dream. Actually away from Manila, actually eating food that is food once more, actually sleeping on springs and mattresses, putting on heavier clothes, talking the English language, meeting civilized people, and realizing what it means to be homeward bound ! It seems unreal after those two years of Manila life that was so different, so divorced from the busy life of the western world ; much more unreal than did the new Philippine environment appear two years ago. YESTERDAYS IN" THE PHILIPPINES 225 after jumping into it fresli from God's country, as the Captain. called it. Here we are, eight days out from Manila, steaming up through that far-famed inland sea of Japan, on the good ship Coptic, bound for San Francisco ; and for the life of me those twenty-four moons just passed all seem to huddle into yesterday. Surely it was only the day before that the China was taking me and my trunks the other way. And so it takes but eight short days of new experiences, new food, new air, to efface completely the effect of seven hundred yester- days in the Philippines. Those whole seven hundred seem now as but one, and when I think of all the housekeeping, the bookkeeping, the hemp-pressing, and the cheerful putting up with all sorts of things, they all seem to be playing leapfrog with each other in the dream of a night, and I wake up to find the pines of Japan lending a certain cordial to the air that is very grateful. We never knew what we were missing in Manila in the slight matter of eating alone until we got over to Hong Kong again, and it is perhaps just as well we didn't. To think of the " dead hen," as they call it, and rice, the daily couple of eggs, the fried potatoes, and the banana-fritters on which we have tried to fatten our frames, and then look at the bill of fare on the Coptic ! We exiles from Manila have gained over five pounds in these eight days, 226 YESTERDAYS ITST THE PHILIPPINES and would almost go through another two years in the haunts of heathendom for the sake of again liv- ing through a sundry few days like the past eight, ia which the inner man wakes up to see his opportuni- ties, and makes up for lost time on soups that are not all rice and water, on fish that is not fishy, on chickens that are not boiled almost alive, on roasts that taste not of garlic, on vegetables that are something more than potatoes, on butter that is not axle-grease, and on puddings and pies that are not made of chopped blotting paper and flavored with pomatum sauces. An exuberance of spirit must be forgiven, for so welcome is the change from the old cultivated Manila contentment that the present burst of native enthusi- asm is but natural. Not that I am playing false to the Malay capital— for let it be said that when once you have forgotten the good things at home the ar- ticles which that Pearl of the Orient had to furnish went well enough indeed — but that after schooling one's taste to things of low degree it is peculiarly melodramatic to return to things of high estate. " Our send-off from Manila on the 14th was as gay as the sad occasion could warrant, and several launch- loads of the " bosses and the boys " worried out to bid us a last adios. The Esmeralda was to have the honor of taking us away from the place to which she had brought us, and I was thoroughly o >1 o YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 227 prepared to go tlirough the interesting process that was needed finally to straighten me out after the pe- culiar twisting which the voyage from Manila to Hong Kong had given me two years before. The sunset over the mountains at the mouth of the bay was emiaently fitting in its concluding ceremo- nies, and it seemed to do its best for us on this last evening in the Philippines. The many ships in the fleet lay quietly swinging at their anchors. The breeze from the early northeast monsoon blew gently off the shore, and Manila never looked fairer than she did on that evening, with her white churches and towers backed up against the tall blue velvet moun- tains, and her whole long low-lying length lifted, as it were, into mid-air by the smooth sea-mirror be- bween us and the shore. Captain Tayler was as jovial and entertaining as ever, and the colony had no reason to regret being participators in the farewell. We well realized that onr departure was an epoch in the life of the little Anglo-Saxon colony, and in a city where important events are registered as occurring " just after Smith arrived " or " just before Jones went away," it was essential to give the occasion weight enough to carry it down into the weeks succeeding our departure. Our native servants came off with the bags and baggage and seemed to show as much feeling as they 228 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES had ever exhibited in the receipt of a Christmas present or a box on the ear. And some of our old Chinese friends, from whom we bought bales and bales of hemp in the days gone by, came too, bring- ing with them presents of sUk and tea. Everybody looked sad and thirsty, and made frequeut pilgrim- ages to the saloon in quest of the usual good-by stimulant. The Esmeralda panted to get away, and we had our last words with the motley little assemblage. "We were seeing Manila and the most of them for the last time, and I confess both they and the shore often looked gurgled up in the blur that somehow formed in our eyes. The sun sank below the horizon ; the swift dark- ness that in the tropics hurries after it, brought the electric lights' twinkling gleam out on the Luneta and the long Malecon road running along in front of the old city, from the promenade to the river. The revolving light on the breakwater cast a red streak over the river. The white eye on Corregidor, far away, blinked as the night began, and, just as the warning of " aU ashore " was sounded, the faint strains of the artillery band playing on the Luneta floated out on the breeze over the sleepy waters of the Bay. Our friends clambered aboard the launch, the cus-, YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 229 toms officers took a last taste of tlie refreshment that Captain Tayler gives them to make them genial, the anchor was hoisted, and, with cheers from the tug and the screeching of launch- whistles, the Esmeralda put to sea, bearing with her, in us two, half the American colony in Manila and the only American firm in the Philippines. CONCLUSION If one has thoughts of going out to the Philippines he should learn how to speak Spanish, and how to accept, " cum grano salis," descriptions of the coun- try, either too glowing or too gloomy. Some have gone to Manila and liked it, others have made their retreat homeward echo with tales of weary woe about this Malay capital. To each it seems to mean some- thing different according as he kept his health or lost it, as he fell in with the life or didn't, and as he was successful or unsuccessful in that for which he left the upper side of the globe. Before buying one's ticket for the Far East one must not be moved by the sugges- tions of " thoughtful " persons, who say you are going to the ends of the earth and must therefore take all sorts of clothes, pianos, and means of subsistence. Accept their sympathy but not always their advice, and if Manila be your destination, be assured you are not bound for an altogether isolated village. They may do some things out there which are not down on the programme of a day's routine in the United States. The fire-engines may be drawn by oxen, the 330 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES 231 natiTes — contrary to Biblical suggestion — may build the roof to their shanties first and make arrangements for underpinning afterward ; women may smoke cigars, and snakes may be more effective rat-catchers than cats or terriers. But there are shops in Manila, tailors, drug-stores, parks, tramways, churches, elec- tric lights, schools, and theatres which are not alto- gether unlike those in the Western world. And, in times of peace, the capital is not an alto- gether bad sort of a place to live in, though I can't say as much for some of the lesser towns. One may be susceptible to fever, in which case he must avoid sleeping near the ground or going about much in the sun. He may suffer from prickly heat, in which case he will not want to take oatmeal, drink choco- late, eat mangoes, or smoke pipes. Or he may be- come a mark for sprue — that peculiarly oriental disease which seems to destroy the lining to one's interior — in which case the quicker he takes the steamer for Japan or for 'Frisco the better. He may run against small-pox, but ought not to take it. He will have a cold or two, but won't hear of cholera or find a native word for yellow fever. Should the wind strike in from the northwest during the wet sea- son, he must look out for typhoons, and not be sur- prised if, like my friend the Englishman, he some day finds only his upright piano on the spot where his 232 YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES light-built house stood — the rest of his things having hastened to, the next village. If he feels the ground getting restless he must look out for the oil lamps on the table, or the tiles on the roof. He must not take too cold baths, sleep in silk pajamas, or walk when he has the " peseta " to ride. And in all things he will be better off by remembering to apply that motto of the ancient Greeks, /jiTjBev dyav — ^in nothing to excess. Manila is the new Mecca, and for some time to come she is going to be looked at on the map, talked about at the dinner-table and by the fireside, and A\Titten up from all quarters. At present this Pearl of the Orient is but a jewel in the rough, but with good men to make her laws, and her gates wide open to the pilgrims of the world, she soon should shine as brilliantly as any city in the Far East.