Iloilo, July 31.

I think I told you we had been very lucky in the selling of the greater part of our furniture, and now we have got the calesa and pony off our hands as well, which is a great loss in the evenings, but we had to take what chance we could. Some of the young Englishmen got up a Gymkhana on the beach yesterday, and C—— rode the pony for the last time, when he was lucky enough to win two races out of three, and only missed the third by a misunderstanding about the start.

It was a dull, showery afternoon, unfortunately, but when the rain went off, I strolled down to the beach to see if anything was to be seen. I found crowds of Filipinos standing about the upper part of the beach, and a few hurdles down on the sands, which the receding tide had left quite firm. The competitors, who included some of the young Spaniards and Mestizos, were riding up and down, and just as I arrived on the scene, a race came flying along in great style, to the intense joy of the native onlookers.

The occasion was enlivened by the banda de musica popular, the members of which had been on their way to play in the Plaza, but had strolled down to the beach, where they stood amongst the crowd, and every now and then blew and tootled a tune while they goggled about.

I signalled to our sota and made him go up to the house and fetch me a chair, on which I sat and watched the race. As I sat there a Filipino youth came up and very civilly asked me if the seÑora wanted a muchacho, but I said I did not, as I was quite content with the servants I had at present.

We have had one or two very fine days again lately, and have been for one or two drives, but some very blood-thirsty road-mending has been going on, to prepare the town for the critical eyes of the Taft party, who are to arrive here from Manila on the 14th or 15th of next month. This road-mending is done by hauling the volcanic gravel out of the river beds, and dumping it in huge piles along the middle of the roads, and as the thoroughfares are not lighted, the result is a wild steeplechase with one wheel in the air. Sometimes fellows come along and spread the gravel out, but more generally it just spreads itself. It makes very soft roads, which the heavy carabao-carts plough up at once.

One of the last drives we took was to visit the foreign cemetery, which is on the outskirts of the town, on a road running parallel to the beach. We got out of the trap at a tall wooden gate, which an old man opened to us, and walked up a short avenue of flowering bushes and palms. The graves stood on a grassy plot, with bushes growing about it, laden with large red or yellow blossoms, and crossed at right angles by sandy paths bordered with tiles. They were not ordinary graves, like those one sees at home, for each one was a sort of small brick tunnel some feet from the ground, and closed by a cemented tablet. There were names of some English people on one or two of them, and one had just been opened to send the bones of the occupant back to his native land. The man had been dead twenty-five years, and it seemed to me hardly worth while to disturb him.

A little behind the main row of tombs we came on a Jewish grave—a big marble sarcophagus—with an iron rail round it and inscriptions in Hebrew on the flat top. The marble was native to this country, I have no doubt, as there is plenty of it in the Philippines; in fact some of the small islands are known to be of solid marble, but it does not pay to work them—did I not tell you this before, though?

Mr B—— came to call this afternoon, and was very indignant about local justice, as it appears that one of his Filipino clerks was impudent to a white man in his firm, whereupon the white man naturally struck the Filipino as any ordinary man of grit strikes a man who is rude to him. However, the cur Filipino went off to the police and lodged a complaint. The white man was had up, and has been heavily fined for “assaulting” the Filipino, and Mr B—— says:

“What on earth are you to do with impertinent natives if you don’t hit them? They don’t care a straw if you dismiss them, and take not the least notice of reproof.”

But I think there is right on both sides, for the way some of the white men hit their servants about is brutal and foolish. I said something to this effect, whereupon Mr B—— said, very much surprised:

“Why, doesn’t your husband have to kick your fellows about?”

And he was quite incredulous when I assured him that C—— had never dreamed of such a thing except once, when our first cook had muttered impertinences, and been kicked out on to the Azotea for his rudeness.

“But they are such stupid fools,” argued Mr B——.

We replied that we did not think blows would make them any brighter, on which he laughed and said perhaps we were right, as we certainly had remarkably good servants.

Another guest, Mr M——, was talking about Philippine food, and observed that tomatoes grew so well here. I said I thought they were miserable failures, as they are about the size of walnuts, and quite green. But he maintained that that was because the Filipino just sticks his tomato plants in the ground and goes off to sit in the shade or to a cock-fight, and when he sees any sign of fruit on the plants, he picks it and takes it to market. Any notion of tilling the soil—weeding or manuring—is absolutely unknown to these people, or if known, carefully avoided. Mr M—— said he had seen tomatoes, grown by Chinamen, as good as the very best out of a hothouse at home. There are several Chinese potagÈres in the town where rows of trim little beds may be seen thick with extraordinarily luxuriant crops of vegetables of every sort, but out here no one will eat anything grown by the Chinamen, as those enterprising people employ some dreadful and unmentionable methods of agriculture. Besides this, there are many germs in the teeming, prolific air which invest vegetables such as cabbages, lettuce, etc., and make them very unsafe experiments, even if one can procure any. When I was in Manila, there was a good deal of talk at dinner tables, and much writing in the papers about some American scientist who professed to have found out a way to “treat” the Philippine green lettuces before eating them, so as to destroy some dreadful germ which causes horrible complaints. But it seemed to me less trouble and a great deal safer to give up lettuce as a bad job!

The great and terrible fear in the Philippines is the germ of a disease called “sprue”—a sort of wasting away—which is very difficult to remedy, and almost ineradicable.

Melons would grow well here, for in the wet season anything in the nature of a gourd springs up like a weed—a habit which suits the Filipino agriculturist to perfection. Some of the more energetic spirits fasten a piece of bejuco from the marrow plant up to a window, and gourd vines may often be seen obligingly toiling up a string to hand fruit in to the weary dwellers in a nipa hut. Nevertheless, melons are only to be got from Hong Kong, and even then they are a costly delicacy. Some friends sent us half a watermelon a few days ago, as a present, but we did not like to accept anything so valuable, and insisted on paying for it. What a treat it was!

With the rainy season we also have a tiny hard native fruit that looks like a damson outside, but has white flesh with a stone like a date-stone, and is entirely devoid of any flavour of any sort. I tried having this fruit stewed, but it was even nastier than when raw. When we were at Nagaba for the day, in the spring, we got some fruit like knobs of rose-coloured wax, pink all through, with black pips, and rather tart, but also tasteless. I suppose all these insipid, nasty little native fruits could be cultivated into something nice, in the way that cherries have been developed, and apples and everything else, from the tasteless wild fruit. At present, however, they are tolerable only to the native palate. The best of them is a tiny brown fruit called lazones, which has a fluffy thin brown skin, and grey brown flesh in divisions like an orange, each division containing a large green seed. The flavour of the lazones is sharp, rather nice, and very refreshing, but this fruit only comes from Luzon, and is very expensive, besides being half-rotten by the time it gets here. Bananas, pine-apples, and mangoes—that is all. Bananas one gets unutterably sick of, and pine-apples too—and mangoes, even if one likes them (which we do not), give one prickly heat. In fact tinned strawberries and raspberries are about the best Philippine fruits.

We have received an invitation to the banquet in honour of Mr Taft and his party on the 15th—on the payment of 12 pesos each. But we may have to sail before that date if our Hong Kong steamer comes in. I shall be very sorry if we miss that event, for I think the Taft utterances would be well worth 25 shillings a head, though that does seem a pretty stiff sum for an Iloilo banquet!