Iloilo, Christmas Eve, 1904.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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