Iloilo, April 27, 1905.

Nothing from you by the mail to-day. The forwarding from Manila seems to be so unsatisfactory that we think you had better begin sending letters straight to this place. The address for the future, therefore, will be to us to—P.O. Box 140, Iloilo. You have to put this, as there is no delivery of letters—a most strange and tiresome system. In the outside wall of the post-office is a recess with a number of pigeon holes, some glazed, some shut with a flap, each with its own lock and key, of which the owner keeps a duplicate. On the wall outside is a blackboard where the arrivals and departures of mails are chalked up, and when you see a mail has come in, you go off and do a sort of “bran-pie” dip in your pigeon hole to see what you get out.

To-day we have had a very heavy thunderstorm, which has filled the tanks and cooled the air, the thermometer having gone down from 90° to 82°. The rain came on just as I was dressing after my siesta, so I hurried on a dressing-gown and went out on to the Azotea to see about the pipe, as it was no good blowing my whistle for a servant in the noise of the storm and the terrific din of the rain upon the iron roofs.

I found Sotero having a glorious time with a petroleum can, which people use here for all water-carrying, like we used to see them do in Palestine. This can was fixed to a line, and the muchacho was risking his neck to let it down so as to intercept the overflow of a roof gutter belonging to the people below, and filling every tin, jug, and bath the house possessed, all spread out on the Azotea; giving the concrete floor of the Azotea itself a liberal wash-down at the same time. He was hopping about the balcony, face beaming and clothes dripping wet, and I laughed as I thought of the conventional idea of an English butler! He is a very good butler, all the same, or has learnt to be one, for when he came to us he did not know how to lay a table; while now, if we give a dinner, he insists on arranging everything himself, and does it perfectly, even to folding the serviettes in fancy shapes, which he has got some other servant to teach him.

All round I hear stories of the miseries and terrors people go through with their Filipino servants, and “the inevitable muchacho” is a standing joke in the American papers. But our retainers just jog along in perfect peace, always in the house, always clean and tidy; and as to their work, not only not shirking it, but improving every day, and always ready and willing to give any help in the stables, or anything they can think of. I agree with my friends that we have been very lucky in finding such excellent “boys,” but I must take a little credit to myself too, for having treated them with the utmost consideration and politeness, showing them things patiently over and over again, and never once speaking sharply or angrily. I am sure they appreciate such treatment instead of the way in which I see people scolding and cursing their muchachos, and that our having such good and trustworthy servants is not entirely due to random luck in choosing them.

Now the rain has come. We shall have mosquitoes again—they had almost disappeared in this long drought, but an hour or two after a shower the place is humming with them again.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, on account of which a procession was going about of all sorts of people carrying palm branches, headed by a banda de musica playing “Hiawatha,” and in the midst a large cart covered with coloured paper, bearing an image of some sort; all very tawdry and crude, and not in the least picturesque.

In the evening, when we drove into Jaro, we saw some Negritos from the mountains inland—the aborigines who sometimes come down into the towns on such occasions of Fiesta to do a little trading, and beg and pick up what they can. These people are very small, much smaller even than the Filipinos, who are so little; and they have quite black skins, irregular faces of real nigger type, with big heads of fuzzy black hair, like Bescharins. They were all very dirty and ragged, and looked very skinny and miserable beside the plump Malay town’s-people, and those we saw were begging from door to door, and from everyone they met, poor souls.

Sometimes in the Filipino race a child is born with curly locks instead of the usual black, straight, Chinese-looking hair, and this curliness is considered a great beauty, and tremendously admired; which is very strange, as, of course, such a trait is only a reversion to some strain of the despised Negrito; but the Filipinos are far too stupid to know that. In fact, if the hair is so curly as to be positively woolly, they are more pleased than ever.

On Fiesta days, too, certain beggars appear, sitting by the roads displaying horrible deformities, and praying away at an amazing rate, sometimes with a child to run out and beg for them. It is a simple, unsophisticated idea, that of having your begging done for you, but I don’t know that the custom is confined to Filipinos.

A day or two ago an American described to me an incident of Filipino life, which I thought very characteristic of this people. She told me that after she first came here, she was sitting in the house one day, when she heard a band coming along the street playing a rattling two-step march, so she rushed to the window and pushed the shutter aside to see the fun, which turned out to be a funeral, with a pale blue coffin, decorated with garlands in carved wood painted pink.

I asked her if she thought the people imagined the occasion to be a festive one; but she said no, that they simply did not know one sort of tune from another, she thought, for they were walking along in the most approved mourning style, and as to the coffin, it was only the Filipino idea of taste. It is curious to think what a very thin veneer of our civilisation these people have acquired, and how they would shed it all as easily as my little lizard has cast off his old coat; and would probably, as he does, feel infinitely lighter and jollier in the primitive covering underneath.