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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Anting-Anting Stories, by Sargent Kayme
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Anting-Anting Stories
+       And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos
+
+Author: Sargent Kayme
+
+Release Date: February 26, 2008 [EBook #24690]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANTING-ANTING STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net/ (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         ANTING-ANTING STORIES
+                               And Other
+                     STRANGE TALES of the FILIPINOS
+
+
+
+                                  By
+
+                             Sargent Kayme
+
+
+
+                 Boston: Small, Maynard & Company 1901
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+The life of the inhabitants of the far-away Eastern islands in which
+the people of the United States are now so vitally interested opens to
+our literature a new field not less fresh and original than that which
+came to us when Mr. Kipling first published his Indian tales. India
+had always possessed its wonders and its remarkable types, but they
+waited long for adequate expression. No less wonderful and varied
+are the inhabitants and the phenomena of the Philippines, and a new
+author, showing rare knowledge of the country and its strange peoples,
+now gives us a collection of simple yet powerful stories which bring
+them before us with dramatic vividness.
+
+Pirates, half naked natives, pearls, man-apes, towering volcanoes
+about whose summits clouds and unearthly traditions float together,
+strange animals and birds, and stranger men, pythons, bejuco ropes
+stained with human blood, feathering palm trees now fanned by soft
+breezes and now crushed to the ground by tornadoes;--on no mimic
+stage was ever a more wonderful scene set for such a company of
+actors. That the truly remarkable stories written by Sargent Kayme
+do not exaggerate the realities of this strange life can be easily
+seen by any one who has read the letters from press correspondents,
+our soldiers, or the more formal books of travel.
+
+Strangest, perhaps, of all these possibilities for fiction is the
+anting-anting, at once a mysterious power to protect its possessor
+and the outward symbol of the protection. No more curious fetich
+can be found in the history of folk-lore. A button, a coin, a bit of
+paper with unintelligible words scribbled upon it, a bone, a stone,
+a garment, anything, almost--often a thing of no intrinsic value--its
+owner has been known to walk up to the muzzle of a loaded musket or
+rush upon the point of a bayonet with a confidence so sublime as to
+silence ridicule and to command admiration if not respect.
+
+                                                        The Editor.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    The Anting-Anting of Captain Von Tollig                    1
+    The Cave in the Side of Coron                             21
+    The Conjure Man of Siargao                                41
+    Mrs. Hannah Smith, Nurse                                  65
+    The Fifteenth Wife                                        93
+    "Our Lady of Pilar"                                      113
+    A Question of Time                                       131
+    The Spirit of Mount Apo                                  153
+    With What Measure Ye Mete                                179
+    Told at the Club                                         195
+    Pearls of Sulu                                           211
+
+
+
+
+
+ANTING-ANTING STORIES
+
+THE ANTING-ANTING OF CAPTAIN VON TOLLIG
+
+
+There had been a battle between the American forces and the Tagalogs,
+and the natives had been driven back. The stone church of Santa Maria,
+around which the engagement had been hottest, and far beyond which
+the native lines had now been driven, had been turned into a hospital
+for the wounded Tagalogs left by their comrades on the field. Beneath
+a broad thatched shed behind the church lay the bodies of the dead,
+stiff and still under the coverings of cocoanut-fibre cloth thrown
+hastily over them. The light of a full tropic moon threw the shadow
+of the roof over them like a soft, brown velvet pall. They were to
+be buried between day-break and sunrise, that the men who buried them
+might escape the heat of the day.
+
+The American picket lines had been posted a quarter of a mile beyond
+the church, near which no other guards had been placed. Not long after
+midnight a surgeon, one of the two men left on duty in the church,
+happened to look out through a broken window towards the shed, and
+in the shadow, against the open moonlight-flooded field beyond,
+saw something moving. Looking close he could make out the slim,
+brown figure of a native passing swiftly from one covered form to
+another, and turning back the cocoanut-fibre cloth to look at each
+dead man's face.
+
+Calling the man who was working with him the surgeon pointed out the
+man beneath the shed to him. "That fellow has no business there," he
+said, "He has slipped through the lines in some way. He may be a spy,
+but even if he is not, he is here for no good. We must capture him."
+
+"All right," was the answer. "You go around the church one way,
+and I will come the other."
+
+When the surgeon, outside the hospital, reached a place where he could
+see the shed again, the Tagalog had ceased his search. He had found
+the body he was looking for, and sunk down on his knees beside it was
+searching for something in the clothing which covered the dead man's
+breast. A moment later he had seen the men stealing towards him from
+the church, had cleared the open space beneath the shed at a leap,
+and was off in the moonlight, running towards the outposts. The
+surgeons swore; and one fired a shot after him from his revolver.
+
+"Might as well shoot at the shadow of that palm tree," the one who had
+shot said. "Anyway it will wake up the pickets, and they may catch him.
+
+"What do you suppose he was after?" he added.
+
+"Don't know," said his companion. "You wait, and I'll get a lantern
+and we will see."
+
+The lantern's light showed the clothing parted over a dead man's body,
+and the fragment of a leather thong which had gone about his neck,
+with broken ends. Whatever had been fastened to the thong was gone,
+carried away by the Tagalog when he had fled.
+
+The next morning a prisoner was brought to headquarters. "The picket
+who caught him, sir," the officer who brought the prisoner reported,
+"said he heard a shot near the church where the wounded natives are;
+and then this man came running from that way."
+
+The surgeons who had been on night duty at the hospital were sent for,
+and their story heard.
+
+"Search the man," said the officer in command.
+
+The native submitted to the ordeal in sullen silence, and made no
+protest, when, from some place within his clothing, there was taken a
+small, dirty leather bag from which two broken ends of leather thong
+still hung. Only his eyes followed the officer's hands wolfishly,
+as they untied the string which fastened the bag, and took from it a
+little leather-bound book not more than two inches square. The officer
+looked at the book curiously. It was very thin, and upon the tiny
+pages, yellow with age, there was writing, still legible, although
+the years which had stained the paper yellow had faded the ink. He
+spelled out a few words, but they were in a language which he did not
+know. "Take the man to the prison," he said. "I will keep the book."
+
+Later in the day the officer called an orderly. "Send Lieutenant
+Smith to me," he said.
+
+By one of the odd chances of a war where, like that in the Philippines,
+the forces at first must be hastily raised, Captain Von Tollig and the
+subordinate officer for whom he had sent, had been citizens of the same
+town. The captain had been a business man, shrewd and keen,--too keen
+some of his neighbors sometimes said of him. Lieutenant Smith was a
+college man, a law student. It had been said of them in their native
+town that both had paid court to the same young woman, and that the
+younger man had won in the race. If this were so, there had been no
+evidence on the part of either in the service to show that they were
+conscious of the fact. There had been little communication between
+them, it is true, but when there had been the subordinate officer
+never overlooked the deference due his superior.
+
+"I wish you would take this book," said Captain Von Tollig, after
+he had told briefly how the volume happened to be in his possession,
+"and see if you can translate it. I suspect it must be something of
+value, from the risk this man took to get it; possibly dispatches from
+one native leader to another, the nature of which we ought to know."
+
+The young man took the queer little book and turned the pages
+curiously. "I hardly think what is written here can be dispatches,"
+he said, "The paper and the ink both look too old for that. The
+words seem to be Latin; bad Latin, too, I should say. I think it is
+what the natives call an 'anting-anting;' that is a charm of some
+kind. Evidently this one did not save the life of the man who wore
+it. Probably it is a very famous talisman, else they would not have
+run such a risk to try to get it back."
+
+"Can you read it?"
+
+"Not off hand. With your permission I will take it to my tent, and
+I think I can study it out there."
+
+"Do so. When you make English of it I'd like to know what it says. I
+am getting interested in it"
+
+The lieutenant bowed, and went away.
+
+"Bring that prisoner to me," the captain ordered, later in the day.
+
+"Do you want to go free?" he asked, when the Tagalog had been brought.
+
+"If the Senor wills."
+
+"What is that book?"
+
+The man made no answer.
+
+"Tell me what the book is, and why you wanted it; and you may go home."
+
+"Will the Senor give me back the book to carry home with me?"
+
+"I don't know. I'll see later about that."
+
+"It was an 'anting-anting.' The strongest we ever knew. The man who
+had it was a chief. When he was dead I wanted it."
+
+"If this was such a powerful charm why was the man killed who had it
+on. Why didn't it save him?"
+
+The Tagalog was silent.
+
+"Come. Tell me that, and you may go."
+
+"And have the book?"
+
+"Yes; and have the book."
+
+"It is a very great 'anting-anting.' It never fails in its time. The
+man who made it, a famous wise man, very many years ago, watched
+one whole month for the secrets which the stars told him to write in
+it; but the last night, the night of the full moon, he fell asleep,
+and on that one day and night of the month the 'anting-anting' has
+no good in it for the man who wears it. Else the chief would not be
+dead. You made the attack, that day. Our people never would."
+
+"Lieutenant Smith to see you, sir," an orderly announced.
+
+"All right. Send him in; and take this fellow outside."
+
+"But, Senor," the man's eyes plead for him as loudly as his words;
+"the 'anting-anting.' You said I could have it and go."
+
+"Yes, I know. Go out and wait."
+
+"What do you report, Lieutenant? Can you read it?"
+
+"Yes. This is very singular. There is no doubt but the book is now
+nothing but a charm."
+
+"Yes. I found that out."
+
+"But I feel sure it was originally something more than that. Something
+very strange."
+
+"What?"
+
+"It purports to be the record of the doings of a man who seems to have
+died here many years ago, written by himself. It tells a strange story,
+which, if true, may be of great importance now. To make sure the record
+would be kept the writer made the natives believe it was a charm, while
+its being written in Latin kept the nature of its message from them."
+
+"Have you read it?"
+
+"Most of it. Sometimes a word is gone--faded out;--and a few words I
+cannot translate;--I don't remember all my Latin. I have written out
+a translation as nearly as I can make it out." He handed a paper to
+the captain, who read:
+
+"I, Christopher Lunez, am about to die. Once I had not thought that
+this would be my end,--a tropic island, with only savages about me. I
+had thought of something very different, since I got the gold. Perhaps,
+after all, there is a curse on treasure got as that was. If there
+is, and the sin is to be expiated in another world, I shall know it
+soon. I did not--"
+
+Here there was a break, and the story went on.
+
+"---- all the others are dead, and the wreck of our ship has broken
+to bits and has disappeared. Before the ruin was complete, though,
+I had brought the gold on shore and buried it. No one saw me. The
+natives ran from us at first, far into the forest, and ----"
+
+The words which would have finished the sentence were wanting.
+
+"Where three islands lie out at sea in a line with a promontory like
+a buffalo's head, I sunk the gold deep in the sands, at the foot of
+the cliff, and dug a rude cross in the rock above it. Some day I hope
+a white man guided by this, will find the treasure and--"
+
+"There was no more," said the lieutenant, when the captain, coming
+to this sudden end looked up at him. "The last few pages of the book
+are gone, torn out, or worn loose and lost. What I have translated
+was scattered over many pages, with disconnected signs and characters
+written in between. The book was evidently intended to be looked upon
+as a mystic talisman, probably that the natives on this account might
+be sure to take good care of it.
+
+"All of the Tagalogs who can procure them, carry these
+'anting-anting.' Some are thought to be much more powerful than
+others. Evidently this was looked upon as an unusually valuable
+charm. Sometimes they are only a button, sewed up in a rag. One of
+the prisoners we took not long ago wore a broad piece of cloth over
+his breast, on which was stained a picture of a man killing another
+with a 'barong.' He believed that while he wore it no one could kill
+him with that weapon; and thought the only reason he was not killed
+in the skirmish in which he was captured was because he had the
+'anting-anting' on."
+
+"Do you believe the story which the book tells is true?" the captain
+inquired.
+
+"I don't know. Some days I think I could believe anything about
+this country."
+
+"Have you shown the book to any one else, or told any one what you
+make out of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do not do so, then. That is all, now. I will keep the book," he added,
+putting the little brown volume inside his coat.
+
+Several days later the officer in charge of the quarters where the
+native prisoners were confined reported to the captain: "One of the
+prisoners keeps begging to be allowed to see you, sir," he said. "He
+says you told him he might go free. Shall I let him be brought
+up here?"
+
+"Yes. Send him up."
+
+"Well?" said Captain Von Tollig, when the man appeared at headquarters,
+and the orderly who had brought him had retired.
+
+"The little book, Senor. You said I could have it back, and go."
+
+"Yes. You may go. I will have you sent safely through our lines;
+but the book I have decided to keep."
+
+The man's face grew ash-colored with disappointment or anger. "But,
+Senor," he protested. "You told me ----"
+
+"I know; but I have changed my mind. You can go, if you wish, without
+the book, or not, just as you choose."
+
+"Then I will stay," the Tagalog said slowly, adding a moment later,
+"My people will surely slay me if I go back to them without the book."
+
+"Very well." The captain called for the guard, and the man was taken
+back to prison; but later in the day an order was sent that he be
+released from confinement and put to work with some other captured
+natives about the camp.
+
+During the next two or three weeks a stranger to Tagalog methods
+of warfare might very reasonably have thought the war was ended,
+so far as this island, at least, was concerned. The natives seemed
+to have disappeared mysteriously. Even the men who had been longest
+in the service were puzzled to account for the sudden ceasing of
+the constant skirmishing which had been the rule before. The picket
+lines were carried forward and the location of the camp followed,
+from time to time, as scouting parties returned to report the country
+clear of foes. The advance would have been even more rapid, except
+for the necessity of keeping communication open at the rear with the
+harbour where two American gunboats lay at anchor.
+
+As a result of one of the advances the camp was pitched one night
+upon a broad plateau looking out upon the sea. Inland the ground
+rose to the thickly forest-clad slope of a mountain, to which the
+American officers felt sure the Tagalogs had finally retreated. Early
+in the evening, when the heat of the day had passed, a group of these
+officers were standing with Captain Von Tollig in the center of the
+camp, examining the mountain slope with their glasses.
+
+"What did you say was the name of this place?" one of the officers
+asked a native deserter who had joined the American forces, and at
+times had served as a guide to the expedition.
+
+"That is Mt. Togonda," he answered, pointing to the hills before them,
+"and this," swinging his hand around the plateau on which the camp's
+tents were pitched, "is La Plaza del Carabaos."
+
+The captain's eyes met those of Lieutenant Smith.
+
+"La Plaza del Carabaos" means "The Square of the Water Buffalos."
+
+As if with one thought the two men turned and looked out to sea. The
+sun had set. Against the glowing western sky a huge rock at the
+plateau's farthest limit was outlined. Rough-carved as the rock had
+been by the chisel of nature, the likeness to a water buffalo's head
+was striking. Beyond the rock three islands lay in a line upon the
+sunset-lighted water. Far out from the foot of the cliff the two men
+could hear the waves beating upon the sand.
+
+"This is an excellent place for a camp," the captain said when he
+turned to his men again. "I think we shall find it best to stay here
+for some time."
+
+
+
+Perhaps a month of respite from attack had made the sentries careless;
+perhaps it was only that the Tagalogs had spent the time in gathering
+strength. No one can ever know just how that wicked slaughter of our
+soldiers in the campaign on that island did come about.
+
+The Tagalogs swept down into the camp that night as a hurricane might
+have blown the leaves of the mountain trees across the plateau; and
+then were gone again, leaving death, and wounds worse than death,
+behind them.
+
+When our men had rallied, and had come back across the battle-ground,
+they found among the others, the captain lying dead outside his
+tent. A Tagalog dagger lay beside the body, and the uniform had been
+torn apart until the officer's bare breast showed.
+
+The first full moon of the month shone down upon the dead man's white,
+still face.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CAVE IN THE SIDE OF CORON
+
+
+A "barong" is a Moro native's favourite weapon. With one deft whirl,
+and then a downward slash of the keen steel blade he can cleave the
+skull of an opponent from crown to teeth, or cut an arm clean from
+the shoulder socket.
+
+When I was sent with a squad of brave men from my company to
+reconnoitre from Mt. Halcon, in the Island of Mindoro, and the force
+was ambushed, the way I saw the men meet death will always make me
+hate a Moro. Why I was spared, then, and bound, instead of being
+killed like the men, I could not imagine. Later I knew.
+
+The Moros had no business to be on Mindoro, anyway. Their home was in
+Mindanao, far to the south, but three hundred years of Spanish attempt
+to rule them had left them still an untamed people, and the war between
+the two races had been endless. Each year when the southwest monsoons
+had blown, the Moro war-proas had gone northward carrying murder
+and pillage wherever they had appeared. When the Spanish were not
+too much occupied elsewhere they fitted out retaliatory expeditions
+which left effects of little permanence. That year the Moros had
+found not Spaniards but a small force of American troops, sent south
+from Manila, and from them had cut off my little scouting squad. It
+made no difference to them that we were of another nation. They cared
+nothing for a change in rulers. We were white, and Christians; that
+was enough. We were to be slain.
+
+The leader of the Moros was a tall old man with glittering eyes set
+in a gloomy face. I watched him as I lay bound on the deck of one of
+the war-proas; for, fearing attack I suppose, soon after my capture
+the sails had been spread and the fleet of boats turned to the south.
+
+"Feed him" the chief had said, when night came on, and pointed to
+me with his foot. I thought then I had been saved from death for
+slavery, and deemed that the worst fate possible, I did not know the
+Moro nature.
+
+On the afternoon of the fifth day out, we passed Busuanga and
+approached a small rocky island which I afterwards learned was
+Coron. So far as could be seen no human habitation was near, and far
+to the south stretched the unbroken waters of the Sulu Sea. The chief
+gave an order in the Moro tongue, and a black and yellow flag was run
+up to the mast head. In response to the signal all the proas of the
+fleet joined us in a little bay at the end of the island, and dropped
+anchor. At one side of the bay it would be possible to land and climb
+from there to the top of the island, from which, everywhere else,
+as far as I could see, a sheer cliff came down three hundred feet to
+where the waves beat against the jagged rocks at its base.
+
+The smaller boats which had been towed behind the larger craft were
+cast off and brought alongside the chief's proa. I was lifted into
+one and rowed to a place where we could land. My feet had been untied,
+but my hands were still fastened behind my back. Two Moros grasped me
+by the arms and guided me between them. They would not let me turn
+my head, but I could hear the voices of men following us. The chief
+led the way. He did not speak or pause until we had reached the level
+summit of the island. When he did speak it was in Spanish, which he
+had learned that I understood. We were halted on the very edge of
+the precipice. Far down below the little fleet of war-proas floated
+lightly on the water, the black and yellow signal still fluttering
+from the flag ship. I could see now that the men that had come up the
+path behind me had brought a quantity of ropes. Perhaps there were
+thirty men in all. I wondered what they were going to do with me,
+but had decided that any fate was better than to be a Moro slave.
+
+"Men of Mindanao," said the chief, "you know our errand. You know how
+often men of our band have been captured by the white men of the north
+to lie in prisons there, where death comes so slowly that a 'barong'
+blow would be paradise. The few that have crept back to us, weak,
+hollow-eyed and trembling, have only come to show us what it meant
+to starve, and then have died. The sky is just, and gives us once
+and again a white man to whom we may show that the prophet's words
+'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' are just. Give the white
+dog his due."
+
+Two men grasped me and wound a stout rope, coil after coil, about me
+from my neck to my feet, until I was as helpless as a swathed Egyptian
+mummy. One end of another rope was fastened in a slip-noose about my
+body, and a dozen of the men, sitting well back from the edge of the
+cliff and bracing themselves one against another, paid out the rope.
+
+The chief himself, touching me with his foot as he would have touched
+some unclean thing, rolled me over the brink of the precipice. The
+sharp rocks cut my face until the blood came, but that meant little
+to a man who expected to be dropped upon rocks just as sharp three
+hundred feet beneath him.
+
+Slowly I was lowered down the face of the cliff until, perhaps twenty
+feet down, I found to my surprise that my descent had ceased, and that
+I was dangling before the mouth of a cave of considerable size. While
+I swung there, wondering what would happen next, the end of a rope
+ladder flung down from above dropped across the opening in the side of
+the cliff, and a moment later two agile Moros climbed down the ladder
+and from it entered the cave. From where they stood it was easy for
+them to reach out and haul me in after them, as a bale of merchandise
+swinging from a hoisting pulley is hauled in through a window.
+
+Loosening the slip-knot they fastened into it the rope which had been
+coiled about my body, and giving it a jerk as a signal the whole was
+drawn up out of sight. Then, binding my feet again, they laid me on
+the hard rock near the mouth of the cave, and climbed nimbly back as
+they had come. The rope ladder was drawn up, and I was left alone.
+
+I was to be left there to starve. That was what the chief's "eye for
+an eye and a tooth for a tooth" had meant.
+
+From where they had left me I could see the proas at anchor, and see
+the rocky point on which we had landed. That night they built a fire
+on the rocks where I could see it; and feasted there with songs and
+dancing. Whenever the wind freshened, the smell of the broiling fish
+came up to where I was, and I understood then why it was that I had
+not been fed that day as usual on the deck of the war-proa. I began to
+realise something of the depths of cruelty of the Moro nature. "Began,"
+I say, for I found out later that even then I did not measure it all.
+
+In the morning the proas were still at anchor, and during the day and
+night there was more feasting. Sometime that day I freed my hands. I
+found that the thongs had been nearly cut. Evidently the men who
+left me had meant that I should free myself. It was easy then to
+untie the rope which bound my ankles, but weak as I was from hunger,
+and cramped from being so long bound, it was some time before I could
+bear my weight upon my feet. When I could it was the morning of the
+second day of my imprisonment and the third that I had been without
+food. The men below were sleeping after their carouse, stretched out
+on the decks of the proas. A sentinel on the rocky point poked the
+smouldering embers of the fire and raking out some overdone fragments
+of fish made a breakfast from them and pitched the bones into the
+sea. Only those who have lived three days without food can understand
+how delicious even those cast-off fish bones looked to me. I walked
+away from the mouth of the cave to be where I could not see the man
+eat. The daylight enabled me to explore the interior of the cave
+more thoroughly than I had been able to do before. From a crevice,
+far within, a tiny thread of water trickled down the rock. It was too
+thin to be called a stream, and was dried up entirely by the air before
+it reached the mouth of the cave, but I found that I could press my
+hand against the rock and after a long time gather water enough to
+moisten my lips and throat. For even that I was thankful. At least
+I should not die of thirst.
+
+Still farther in the cave I found a pile of something lying on the
+floor. I could not see in the dark there what it was, but brought
+a double handful out to the light. It was a fragment of a military
+uniform wrapped loosely around some human bones. Dangling from
+the cloth was a corroded button on which I could still discern the
+insignia of Spain. I flung the horrid relics as far out from the cave
+as my weak strength would let me, and sank down, wondering how long
+it would be until the bones and uniform of a soldier of the United
+States would lie rotting there beside those of a soldier of Spain.
+
+A shout from below aroused me. A Moro had seen the fragments of cloth
+fluttering down and had greeted them. The men had landed on the rocky
+point again, and a party of them were coming up the path. Slung on
+a pole carried over the shoulders of two of them was a piece of fish
+net, through the meshes of which I could see a dozen cocoanuts.
+
+There was food; delicious food! And they were bringing it to me! I
+understood it all now. They had not meant to starve me, but only
+to torture me before they took me on to slavery. How good that
+was. Slavery did not seem hard to me now. Slavery was better than
+starvation. Oh I would work gladly enough, no matter how hard the task,
+if I could only have food.
+
+The men had passed out of sight, now, climbing upward, and by and by
+I heard them talking above me. I leaned as far out from the mouth
+of the cave as in my weakness I dared, and looked up. Yes, I was
+right. The bag of cocoanuts was being lowered to me. I could see the
+black face of the Moro who was directing the operation, peering over
+the edge of the cliff. I sank down, too weak to stand. I thought I
+must save what little strength I had to break a nut against the rock,
+when they reached me.
+
+I could see the bottom of the fish net bag. Now it was even with
+the cave. I could reach it if it was only a little nearer. Why did
+not those foolish Moros swing it nearer? I leaned out from the cave
+again to try and signal to them.
+
+What was this I saw? Not one, but twenty black faces grinning down at
+me with devilish cruelty. And the bag of food that I had waited for,
+hung by a rope from the end of the pole pushed out from the rock above,
+swung lazily around and around just beyond my reach. I made a frantic
+effort to grasp it, and barely saved myself from falling headlong. The
+fiendish laughter of the men above was answered by a chorus of shouts
+from below. I looked down. From the decks of the proas and from about
+the fire on shore, where another feast was beginning, the Moro men
+were watching me.
+
+Then I understood for the first time the depths of Moro cruelty. I
+was to be baited there until, crazed by hunger, I flung myself to an
+awful death upon the rocks below. I wondered how many men, perhaps
+braver soldiers than I, had gone down there before me.
+
+I would not. If die I must, I would at least cheat those gibbering
+fiends of their show. I would die as that other man had done, far
+in the cave and out of sight. I dragged myself in, drank from the
+little stream of water, and lay down. I must have slept, or lain in
+a stupor for several hours, since, when I recovered myself again,
+it was late afternoon.
+
+From where I lay I could see the bag of cocoanuts swing in the
+breeze. Perhaps it had blown nearer and I could reach it. I dragged
+myself out to the mouth of the cave again. It was just as far away
+as ever, and I too weak now to try to reach it. After a time I began
+to realise that there was no noise from the revelers below. I looked
+down. The bay was empty. The proas had gone, the men gone with them,
+and not a breath of smoke rising from the ashes showed where their
+fires had been. They must have put out their fires. Dimly I wondered
+why. Anyway I had cheated them of their game. They had become
+discouraged, waiting to see me die, and had gone.
+
+These thoughts were passing weakly through my mind, when suddenly I
+saw something which made me stand up, weak as I was. Far out across
+the Strait of Mindoro a streamer of black smoke showed against the
+sky. My eyes followed it to where a gray hull rested on the water. It
+was one of our gunboats bound from Ilo Ilo back to Manila. I shouted,
+faintly, forgetting that miles of space lay between her and myself. I
+knew when I stopped to think that she was going from me. Even if she
+had come near Coron she had passed while I lay asleep.
+
+That was why the proas had gone. They had seen the streak of smoke,
+and slipping behind the island of Coron had gone around Culion,
+and so on, home.
+
+I must have slept for some time after that, for when I was next
+conscious of anything it was the forenoon of another day, and the cave
+was flooded with the bright light of noon. I did not suffer anything
+now. That seemed to have passed. I lay quite easy, and wondered what
+it was that had aroused me. After a while I could tell. It was the
+ceaseless twittering of a flock of birds which were flying in and
+out of the cave. They had not been there before, nor had I seen them
+about. They must have come during the night. I thought if I could catch
+one I would eat it, but I decided it was useless to try to catch them,
+they darted about so swiftly. By and by I felt sure that this was so,
+for I could see that the birds were swallows, and there came into my
+mind a vivid picture of the high beams of my father's barn, away in
+Vermont, when I was a boy, and the barn swallows flashing like arrows
+through the star-shaped openings far up in the gable ends.
+
+Two of the birds had lighted on the wall opposite me, clinging to the
+rock. I wondered what they were doing there. Perhaps I could catch
+them. I would try. I found that I could rise, and that I was much
+stronger than I had thought. Even a hope of food seemed to give me
+strength. I crept towards the birds and put out my hand. The birds
+flew, and dodging me swept out into the sunlight. I was near enough
+the side of the cave now to see what they had been doing. Fastened
+to the rock was the beginning of what was to be a nest.
+
+Once, years before that, I had been the guest of honor at a ten
+course Chinese dinner. After the tiny China cups of fiery liquor,
+which was the first course, had been drunk, the servant brought on
+what looked to me like fine white sponges boiled in chicken broth. My
+host told me that this was birds' nest soup, the most famous dish of
+China, made of material worth its weight in gold. It came back to
+me now that he had added that the best nests were gathered in the
+Philippine Islands. Little did I imagine then what that scrap of
+table conversation might one day mean to me.
+
+I pulled the nest down and ate it. It looked like white glue, and
+tasted like beef jelly. I looked for another, and found it and ate
+it. There were no more. I drank my fill of water, when I could get it,
+which took some time, and then I lay down and went to sleep. I felt as
+if I had eaten a full meal. When I woke I could almost have danced,
+I felt so strong and well again. In my new strength I even tried to
+reach the bag of cocoanuts, but they hung just as far off as ever,
+and that was so far no breeze quite swung them within my reach. No
+matter! While I had slept, the birds had been at work, and half a
+dozen half-formed nests were glued to the rocks in easy reach. They
+grew like mushrooms in the night. I pulled down two and ate them. For
+dinner I had two more, and one for supper.
+
+After that I had no cause to suffer, so far as food and water were
+concerned. When the birds built faster than my immediate wants
+required, I tore the completed nests down before the builders could
+spoil them, and stored them away. The birds twittered and scolded,
+but began to build again.
+
+How long this would have lasted I do not know, but one morning when I
+woke and came to the mouth of the cave to look out, I saw that in the
+night a Chinese junk, with broad latteen sails, had dropped anchor
+in the bay below.
+
+The shout of joy I gave came near being my ruin, for when the
+Chinese sailors heard it, and looked up to see a white faced figure
+gesticulating wildly in a hole in the front of the cliff, so far above
+them they thought, quite reasonably enough, that they had discovered
+the door to the home of the evil one himself, and that one of his
+ministers was trying to entice them to enter. Fortunately they could
+not flee until the anchor was raised and the sails unfurled, and
+before this was done their curiosity and common sense combined had
+conquered their fear. The leader of the expedition, I learned later,
+had been to Coron before, and now, lighting a few joss sticks as a
+precaution, in case I did prove to be an evil spirit, he climbed
+to the top of the cliff where he could talk with me. He had seen
+Moro fish nets and proa masts before, and he knew the Moro nature,
+so it did not take long to make him understand my story, nor much
+longer for him to effect my release, for these Chinese nest-hunting
+expeditions go fitted with all manner of rock scaling machinery in
+the way of rope ladders, slings and baskets.
+
+I was very kindly treated on board the junk through all the month the
+party stayed there gathering nests, but when the men came to know
+my story, and learned how for two weeks I had lived on nothing but
+swallows' nests, worth their weight in gold, remember, they used to
+look at me, some of them, in a way which made me almost wonder if
+sometime when I was asleep they might not kill me, as the farmer's
+wife killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CONJURE MAN OF SIARGAO
+
+
+When I woke that morning, the monkey was sitting on the footboard
+of my bed, looking at me. Not one of those impudent beasts that do
+nothing but grin and chatter, but a solemn, old-man looking animal,
+with a fatherly, benevolent face.
+
+All the same, monkeys are never to be trusted, even if you know more
+about them than I could about one which had appeared unannounced in
+my sleeping room over night.
+
+"Filipe!" I shouted, "Filipe!"
+
+The woven bamboo walls of a Philippine house allow sound and air to
+pass freely, and my native servant promptly entered the room.
+
+"Take that monkey away," I said.
+
+"Oh Senor," cried Filipe. "Never! You cannot mean it. The Conjure
+man of Siargao brought him to you this morning, as a gift. Much good
+always comes to the house which the Conjure man smiles on."
+
+"Who in the name of Magellan is the Conjure man, and why is he smiling
+on me?" I asked.
+
+"He is an old, old man who has lived back in the mountains for many
+years. He knows more conjure charms than any other man or woman in
+Siargao. The mountain apes come to his house to be fed, and people
+say that he can talk with them. He left no message, but brought the
+monkey, and said that the beast was for you."
+
+"Well, take the creature out of the room while I dress, can't you?"
+
+"Si, Senor," Filipe replied; but the way in which he went about the
+task showed that for him, at least, a gift monkey from the Conjure man
+of Siargao was no ordinary animal. The monkey, after gravely inspecting
+the hand which Filipe respectfully extended to him, condescended to
+step from the footboard of the bed upon it, and be borne from the room.
+
+After that the "wise man," for I gave the little animal this name,
+was a regular member of my family, and in time I came to be attached to
+him. He was never mischievous or noisy, and would sit for an hour at a
+time on the back of a chair watching me while I wrote or read. He was
+expert in catching scorpions and the other nuisances of that kind which
+make Philippine housekeeping a burden to the flesh, and never after
+he was brought to me did we have any annoyance from them. He seemed
+to feel that the hunting of such vermin was his especial duty, and,
+in fact, I learned later that he had been regularly trained to do this.
+
+Chiefly, though, he helped me in the increase of prestige which he gave
+me with the natives. Filipe treated me with almost as much respect as
+he did the monkey, when he realised that for some inscrutable reason
+the Conjure man had chosen to favour me with his friendship. The
+villagers, after that early morning visit, looked upon my thatched
+bamboo hut as a sort of temple, and I suspect more than once crept
+stealthily up conveniently close trees at night to try to peer between
+the slats of which the house was built, to learn in that way if they
+could, what the inner rooms of the temple were like.
+
+My house was "up a tree." Up several trees, in fact. Like most of
+those in Siargao it was built on posts and the sawed off trunks
+of palm trees. The floor was eight feet above the ground, and we
+entered by way of a ladder which at night we drew up after us, or
+rather I drew up, for since Filipe slept at home, the "wise man" and
+I had our house to ourselves at night. The morning the monkey came,
+Filipe was prevailed upon to borrow a ladder from another house,
+and burglarise my home to the extent of putting the monkey in.
+
+I had been in Siargao for two years, as the agent of a Hong Kong firm
+which was trying to build up the hemp industry there. That was before
+the American occupation of the islands. The village where I lived
+was the seaport. I would have been insufferably lonesome if I had
+not had something to interest me in my very abundant spare time, for
+during much of the year I was, or rather I had supposed I was, with the
+exception of the Padre, the only white man on the island. Twice a year
+the Spanish tax collector came and stayed long enough to wring every
+particle of money which he possibly could out of the poor natives, and
+then supplemented this by taking in addition such articles of produce
+as could be easily handled, and would have a money value in Manila.
+
+The interest which I have referred to as sustaining me was in
+the plants, trees and flowers of the island. I was not a trained
+naturalist, but I had a fair knowledge of commercial tropic vegetation
+before I came to the island, and this had proved a good foundation
+to work on. Our hemp plantation was well inland, and in going to and
+from this I began to study the possibilities of the wild trees and
+plants. It ended in my being able to write a very fair description of
+the vegetation of this part of the archipelago, explaining how many
+of the plants might be utilized for medicine or food, and the trees
+for lumber, dyestuffs or food.
+
+One who has not been there cannot begin to understand the possibilities
+of the forests under the hands of a man who really knows them. One
+of the first things which interested me was a bet Filipe made with
+me that he could serve me a whole meal, sufficient and palatable,
+and use nothing but bamboo in doing this.
+
+The only thing Filipe asked to have to work with was a "machete,"
+a sharp native sword. With this he walked to the nearest clump of
+bamboo, split open a dry joint, and cutting out two sticks of a
+certain peculiar shape made a fire by rubbing them together. Having
+got his fire he split another large green joint, the center of which
+he hollowed out. This he filled with water and set on the fire, where
+it would resist the action of the heat until the water in it boiled,
+just as I have seen water in a pitcher plant's leaf in America set on
+the coals of a blacksmith's fire and boiled vigorously. In this water
+he stewed some fresh young bamboo shoots, which make a most delicious
+kind of "greens," and finally made me from the wood a platter off
+which to eat and a knife and fork to eat with. I acknowledged that
+he had won the bet.
+
+It was on one of the excursions which I made into the forest in my
+study of these natural resources, that I met the Conjure man. I had
+been curious to see him ever since he had called on me that morning
+before I was awake, and left the "wise man," in lieu of a card, but
+inquiry of Filipe and various other natives invariably elicited the
+reply that they did not know where he lived. I learned afterwards
+that the liars went to him frequently, for charms and medicines to
+use in sickness, at the very time they were telling me that they did
+not even know in what part of the forest his home was. Later events
+showed that fear could make them do what coaxing could not.
+
+It happened that one of my expeditions took me well up the side of a
+mountain which the natives called Tuylpit, so near as I could catch
+their pronunciation. I never saw the name in print. The mountain's
+sides were rocky enough so that they were not so impassable on
+account of the dense under-growth as much of the island was, and I had
+much less trouble than usual going forward after I left the regular
+"carabaos" (water buffalo) track.
+
+I had gone on up the mountain for some distance, Filipe, as usual,
+following me, when, turning to speak to him, I found to my amazement
+that the fellow was gone. How, when or where he had disappeared I
+could not imagine, for he had answered a question of mine only a
+moment before.
+
+If I had been surprised to find myself alone, I was ten times more
+surprised to turn back again and find that I was not alone.
+
+A man stood in the path in front of me, an old man, but standing well
+erect, and with keen dark eyes looking out at me from under shaggy
+white eyebrows.
+
+I knew at once, or felt rather than knew, for the knowledge was
+instinctive, that this must be the Conjure man of Siargao, but I was
+dumbfounded to find him, not, as I had supposed, a native, but a white
+man, as surely as I am one. Before I could pull myself together enough
+to speak to him, he spoke to me, in Spanish, calling me by name.
+
+"You see I know your name," he said, and then added, as if he saw
+the question in my eyes, "Yes, it was I who brought the monkey to
+your house. I knew so long as he was there no man or woman on this
+island would molest you.
+
+"You wonder why I did it? Because in all the time you have been here,
+and in all your going about the island, you have never cruelly killed
+the animals, as most white men do who come here. The creatures of the
+forest are all I have had to love, for many years, and I have liked
+you because you have spared them. How I happened to come here first,
+and why I have stayed here all these years, is nothing to you. Quite
+likely you would not be so comfortable here alone with me if you
+knew. Anyway, you are not to know. You are alone, you see. Your servant
+took good care to get out of the way when he knew that I was coming."
+
+"How did you know my name," I made out to ask, "and so much about me?"
+
+"The natives have told me much of you, when they have been to me
+for medicines, which they are too thickheaded to see for themselves,
+although they grow beneath their feet. Then I have seen you many times
+myself, when you have been in the forest, and had no idea that I,
+or any one, for that matter, was watching you."
+
+"Why do I see you now, then?" I asked.
+
+"Because the desire to speak once more to a white man grew too strong
+to be resisted. Because you happened to come, to-day, near my home,
+to which," he added, with a very courteous inclination of his head,
+"I hope that you will be so good as to accompany me."
+
+I wish that I could describe that strange home so that others could
+see it as I did.
+
+Imagine a big, broad house, thatched, and built of bamboo, like all
+of those in Siargao, that the earthquakes need not shake them down,
+but built, in this case, upon the ground. A man to whom even the snakes
+of the forest were submissive, as they were to this man, had no need
+to perch in trees, as the rest of us must do, in order to sleep in
+safety. Above the house the plumy tops of a group of great palm trees
+waved in the air. Birds, more beautiful than any I had ever seen
+on the island, flirted their brilliant feathers in the trees around
+the house, and in the vines which laced the tops of the palm trees
+together a troop of monkeys was chattering. The birds showed no fear
+of us, and one, a gorgeous paroquet, flew from the tree in which it
+had been perched and settled on the shoulder of the Conjure man. The
+monkeys, when they saw us, set up a chorus of welcoming cries, and
+began letting themselves down from the tree tops. My guide threw a
+handful of rice on the ground for the bird, and tossed a basket of
+tamarinds to where the monkeys could get them. Then, having placed
+me in a comfortable hammock woven of cocoanut fibre, and brought me
+a pipe and some excellent native tobacco, he slung another hammock
+for himself, and settled down in it to ask me questions.
+
+Imagine telling the news of the world for the last quarter of a century
+to an intelligent and once well-educated man who has known nothing of
+what has happened in all that time except what he might learn from
+ignorant natives, who had obtained their knowledge second hand from
+Spanish tax collectors only a trifle less ignorant than themselves.
+
+Just in the middle of a sentence I became aware that some one was
+looking at me from the door of the house behind me. Somebody or
+something, I had an uncomfortable feeling that I did not quite know
+which. I twisted around in the hammock to where I could look.
+
+An enormous big ape stood erect in the doorway, steadying herself
+by one hand placed against the door casing. She was looking at me
+intently, as if she did not just know what to do.
+
+My host had seen me turn in the hammock. "Europa," he said, and then
+added some words which I did not understand.
+
+The huge beast came towards me, walking erect, and gravely held out a
+long and bony paw for me to shake. Then, as if satisfied that she had
+done all that hospitality demanded of her, she walked to the further
+end of the thatch verandah and stood there looking off into the forest,
+from which there came a few minutes later the most unearthly and yet
+most human cry I ever heard.
+
+I sprang out of my hammock, but before I could ask, "what was
+that?" the big ape had answered the cry with another one as weird as
+the first.
+
+"Sit down, I beg of you," my host said. "That was only Atlas, Europa's
+mate, calling to her to let us know that he is nearly home. They
+startled you. I should have introduced them to you before now."
+
+While he was still talking, another ape, bigger than the first, came
+in sight beneath the palms. Europa went to meet him, and they came
+to the house together.
+
+As I am a living man that enormous animal, uncanny looking creature,
+walked up to me and shook hands. The Conjure man had not spoken to him,
+that was certain. If any one had told him to do this it must have been
+Europa. The demands of politeness satisfied, the strange couple went
+to the farther side of the verandah and squatted down in the shade.
+
+"Can you talk with them?" I suddenly made bold to ask.
+
+"Who told you I could?" the Conjure man inquired sharply.
+
+"Filipe," I said.
+
+But his question was the only answer my question ever received.
+
+Later, when I said it was time for me to start for home, he set me out
+a meal of fruit and boiled rice. I quite expected to hear him order
+Europa to wait on the table, but he did not, and when I came away,
+and he came with me down the mountain as far as the "carabaos" track,
+the two big apes stayed on the verandah as if to guard the house.
+
+When we parted at the foot of the mountain, although I am sure he
+had enjoyed my visit, my strange host did not ask me to come again,
+and when he gently declined my invitation for him to come and see me,
+I did not repeat it. I had a feeling that it would do no good to urge
+him, and that if a time ever came when he wanted to see me again he
+would make the wish known to me of his own accord.
+
+It was not more than a month after my visit to the mountain home
+that the Spanish tax collector came for his semi-annual harvest. The
+boat which brought him would call for him a month later, and in
+the intervening time he would have got together all the property
+which could be squeezed or beaten out of the miserable natives. This
+particular man had been there before, and I heartily disliked him,
+as the worst of his kind I had yet seen. Inasmuch as he represented
+the government to which I also had to pay taxes and was, except for
+the Padre, about the only white man I saw unless it was when some of
+our own agents came to Siargao, I felt disgusted when I saw that this
+man had returned. He brought with him, on this trip, as a servant,
+a good-for-nothing native who had gone away with him six months
+before to save his neck from the just wrath of his own people for a
+crime which he had committed. Secure in the protection afforded by
+his employer's position, and the squad of Tagalog soldiers sent to
+help in collecting the taxes, this man had the effrontery to come
+back and swell about among his fellow people, any one of whom would
+have cut his throat in a minute if they could have done it without
+fear of detection by the tax collector.
+
+I noticed, though, that the servant was particularly careful to sleep
+in the same house with his master, and did not go home at night,
+as Filipe did. The government representative had a house of his own,
+which was occupied only when he was on the island. It was somewhat
+larger than the other houses of the place, but like them was built
+on posts well up from the ground, and reached by a ladder which could
+be taken up at will, as, I noticed, it always was at night.
+
+When the collector had been in Siargao less than a week, I was
+surprised to have him come to my place one day and ask me abruptly
+if I had ever seen any big apes in my excursions over the island.
+
+I am obliged to confess that I lied to him very promptly and directly,
+for I told him at once that I never had. You see there had come into
+my mind at once what the lonely old man on the mountain had said
+about men who came and killed the animals he loved, and I could see
+as plainly as when I left them there, the two big apes sitting on the
+verandah of his home, watching us as we came down the mountain path,
+and waiting to welcome him when he came home.
+
+The "wise man," sitting on top of the tallest piece of furniture
+in the room, to which he had promptly mounted when my caller came
+in, said nothing, but his solemn eyes looked at me in a way which
+makes me half willing to swear that he had understood every word,
+and countenanced my untruthfulness.
+
+The tax collector looked up at the monkey suspiciously, as if he
+sometime might have heard how the animal came into my possession,
+as, in fact, I had reason afterwards to think he had.
+
+"Caramba," he grunted. "I have reason to think there are big apes
+here. Juan," his black-leg--in every sense of the word--servant,
+"has told me there is an old man here who has tamed them. He says he
+knows where the man lives, back in the mountains.
+
+"If I can find a big ape while I am here, this time," he went on,
+"I mean to have him or his hide. There was an agent for a museum of
+some kind in England, in Manila when I came away, and he told me he
+would give me fifty dollars for the skin of such a beast."
+
+He went on talking in this way for quite a while, but I did not
+more than half hear what he was saying, for I was trying to think
+of some way in which I could send word to the old man to guard his
+companions. I finally decided, however, that Juan, though quite vile
+enough to do such a thing, would never dare to guide his employer to
+the Conjure man's house.
+
+I did not properly measure the heart of a native doubly driven by
+hate of a former master from whom he is free, and fear of a master
+by whom he is employed at the present time.
+
+The very next day Juan went to the Conjure man's house, and in his
+master's name demanded that one of the apes be brought, dead or alive,
+to the tax collector's office.
+
+The only answer he brought back, except a slashed face on which the
+blood was even then not dry, was:
+
+"Does a father slay his children at a stranger's bidding?"
+
+The next day I was in the forest all day long. When I came home
+in the edge of the evening, and passed the tax collector's house,
+I said words which I should not wish to write down here, although I
+almost believe that the tears which were running down my cheeks at the
+time washed the record of my language off the recording angel's book,
+just as they would have blotted out the words upon this sheet of paper.
+
+Europa, noble great animal, lay dead on the ground in front of the
+house, the slim, strong paw, like a right hand, which she had reached
+out to welcome me, drabbled with dirt where it had dragged behind the
+"carabaos" cart in which she had been brought, and which had been
+hardly large enough to hold her huge body.
+
+I knew it was Europa. I would have known her anywhere, even if
+Filipe, white with fear and rage, had not told me the story when I
+reached home.
+
+Juan had guided the tax collector to the mountain home in an evil
+moment when its owner and Atlas, by some chance were away. The Spaniard
+had shot Europa, standing in the door, as I had seen her standing,
+and the two men had brought the body down the mountain.
+
+I think Filipe, and perhaps the other natives, expected nothing less
+than that the village, if not the whole island, would be destroyed by
+fire from the sky, that night, or swallowed up in the earth, but the
+night passed with perfect quiet. Not a sound was heard, nor a thing
+done to disturb our sleep, or if, as I imagine was the case with some
+of us who did not sleep, our peace.
+
+Only, in the morning, when no one was seen stirring about the tax
+collector's house, and then it grew noon and the lattices were not
+opened or the ladder let down, the Tagalog soldiers brought another
+ladder and put it against the house, and I climbed up and went in,
+to find the two men who stayed there, the Spaniard and Juan, dead on
+the floor. Their swollen faces, black and awful to look at, I have
+seen in bad dreams since. On the throat of each were the blue marks
+of long, strong fingers.
+
+And the body of Europa was gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. HANNAH SMITH, NURSE
+
+
+The red eye of the lighthouse on Corregidor Island blazed out
+through the darkness as a Pacific steamer felt her way cautiously
+into Manila harbour.
+
+Although it was nearly midnight, a woman--one of the passengers on
+the steamer--was still on deck, and standing well up toward the bow
+of the boat was peering into the darkness before her as if she could
+not wait to see the strange new land to which she was coming. Surely
+it would be a strange land to her, who, until a few weeks before
+had scarcely in all her life been outside of the New England town in
+which she had been born.
+
+People who had seen her on the steamer had wondered sometimes that
+a woman of her age--for she was not young--should have chosen to
+go to the Philippine Islands as a nurse, as she told them she was
+going. Sometimes, at first, they smiled at some of her questions,
+but any who happened to be ill on the voyage, or in trouble, forgot
+to do that, for in the touch of her hand and in her words there was
+shown a skill and a nobleness of nature which won respect.
+
+
+
+The colonel of a regiment stationed near Manila was sitting in his
+headquarters. An orderly came to the door and saluted.
+
+"A woman to see you, sir," he said.
+
+"A woman? What kind of a woman?"
+
+"A white woman, sir. Looks about fifty years old. Talks American. Says
+she has only just come here. Says her name is Smith."
+
+"Show her in."
+
+The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him
+the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when
+the boat came past the light of Corregidor.
+
+The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. "What can I do for you?" he said.
+
+"Can I speak to you alone?"
+
+"We are alone now."
+
+"Can't that man out there hear?" motioning toward a soldier pacing
+back and forth before the door.
+
+"No," said the officer. "We are quite alone."
+
+The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding,
+and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. "I want
+to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment," she said. "Can
+you tell me where he is?"
+
+In spite of himself--in spite of the self possession which he would
+have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel
+started.
+
+"Are you his--?" he began to say. But he changed the question to,
+"Was he a relative of yours?"
+
+"I am his mother," the woman said, as if she had completed the
+officer's first question in her mind and answered it.
+
+"I have a letter from him, here," she went on. "The last one I have
+had. It is dated three months ago. It is not very long." She held up
+a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil;
+but she did not offer to let the officer read what was written.
+
+"He tells me in this letter," the woman said, "that he has disgraced
+himself, been a coward, run away from some danger which he ought to
+have faced; and that he can't stand the shame of it." "He says," the
+woman's voice faltered for the first time, and instead of looking the
+Colonel in the face, as she had been doing, her eyes were fixed on the
+floor--"he says that he isn't going to try to stay here any longer,
+and that he is going over to the enemy. Is this true? Did he do that?"
+
+"Yes," said the officer slowly. "It is true."
+
+"He says here," the woman went on, holding up the letter again,
+"that I shall never hear from him again, or see him. I want you to
+help me to find him."
+
+"I would be glad to help you if I could," the man said, "but I
+cannot. No one knows where the man went to, except that he disappeared
+from the camp and from the city. Besides I have not the right. He was
+a coward, and now he is a deserter. If he came back now he would have
+to stand trial, and he might be shot."
+
+"He is not a coward." The woman's cheeks flamed red. "Some men shut
+their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that
+don't make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time,
+and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess
+I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy--my only
+child. I've come out here to find him, and I'm going to do it. I
+don't expect I'll find him quick or easy, perhaps. I've let out our
+farm for a year, with the privilege of renewing the trade when the
+year is up; and I'm going to stay as long as need be. I'm not going
+to sit still and hold my hands while I'm waiting, either. I'm going
+to be a nurse. I know how to take care of the sick and maimed all
+right, and I guess from what I hear since I've been here you need
+all the help of that kind you can get. All I want of you is to get
+me a chance to work nursing just as close to the front as I can go,
+and then do all you can to help me find out where Heber is, and then
+let me have as many as you can of these heathen prisoners the men
+bring in here to take care of, so I can ask them if they have seen
+Heber. My boy isn't a coward, and if he has got scared and run away,
+he's got to come back and face the music. Thank goodness none of the
+folks at home know anything about it, and they won't if I can help it."
+
+The woman folded the letter, and putting it back into its envelope sat
+waiting. It was evident that she did not conceive of the possibility
+even of her request not being granted.
+
+The officer hesitated.
+
+"You will have to see the General, Mrs. Smith," he said at last,
+glad that it need not be his duty to tell her how hopeless her
+errand was. "I will arrange for you to see him. I will take you to
+him myself. I wish I could do more to help you."
+
+"How soon can I see him?"
+
+"Tomorrow, I think. I will find out and let you know."
+
+"Thank you," said the woman, as she rose to go. "I don't want to lose
+any time. I want to get right to work."
+
+The next day the young soldier's mother saw the General and told
+her story to him. In the mean time, apprised by the Colonel of the
+regiment of the woman's errand, the General had had a report of
+the case brought to him. Heber Smith had been sent out with a small
+scouting party. They had been ambushed, and instead of trying to fight,
+he had left the men and had run back to cover.
+
+"But that don't necessarily make him a coward," the young man's mother
+pleaded with the General. "A coward is a man who plans to run away. He
+lost his head that time. Wasn't that the first time he had been put
+in such a place?"
+
+The officer admitted that it was.
+
+"Well, then he can live it down. He has got to, for the sake of his
+father's reputation as well as his own. His father was a soldier,
+too," she said proudly. "He was in the Union army four years, and had
+a medal given to him for bravery, and every spring since he died the
+members of his Grand Army Post have decorated his grave. When Heber
+comes to think of that, I know he will come back."
+
+The General was not an old man;--that is he was not so old but that,
+back in her prairie home in a western state, there was a mother to
+whom he wrote letters, a mother whom he knew to value above his life
+itself his reputation. The thought of her came to him now.
+
+"I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith" he said, "to help you find your
+boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be
+found I cannot promise you anything as to his future."
+
+"Thank you," said the woman. "That is all I can ask."
+
+And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse,
+and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any
+nurse could go.
+
+Six months passed, and then another six came near to their
+end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New
+England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor's wife to see
+that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with
+a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.
+
+In this year's time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering
+of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived
+the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this,
+so her companions said, was her being "just possessed to talk with
+those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital." The
+other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases
+they liked least--the natives--but asked for them.
+
+And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all
+Mrs. Smith's native patients--if they did not die before they got
+able to talk coherently--had to go through the same catechism:
+
+Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come;
+a white man who had come there from the American army?
+
+Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?
+
+Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin,
+where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?
+
+Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)
+
+From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some
+of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog
+natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.
+
+One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week
+before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the
+first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who
+naturally fell, now, to "Mrs. Smith's lot," as the surgeons called
+them. As soon as the nurse's watchful eyes saw the change in the man
+she came to him and bent over his cot.
+
+"Water, please," he murmured
+
+The woman brought the water, her two natures struggling to decide
+what she should do after she had given it to him. As nurse, she knew
+the man ought not to be allowed to talk then. As mother, she was
+impatient to ask him where he had learned to speak English, and to
+inquire if he knew her boy.
+
+The nurse conquered. The patient drank the water and was allowed to
+go to sleep again undisturbed.
+
+In time, though, he was stronger, and then, one day, the mother's
+questions were asked for the hundredth time; and the last.
+
+Yes, the prisoner patient knew just such a man. He had come among the
+people of the tribe many months ago. He was a tall, fair young man,
+and he had such a scar as the "senora," described. He was a fine young
+man. Once, when this man's father had been sick, the white man had
+doctored him and made him well. It was this white man, the patient
+said, who had taught him the little English that he knew.
+
+"Yes," when he saw the photograph of Heber Smith, "that is the man. He
+has a picture, too," the patient said, "two pictures, little ones,
+set in a little gold box which hangs on his watch chain."
+
+The hospital nurse unclasped a big cameo breast pin from the throat
+of her gown and held it down so that the man in bed could see a
+daguerreotype set in the back of the pin.
+
+"Was one of the pictures like that?" she asked.
+
+The Tagalog looked at the picture, a likeness of a middle-aged man
+wearing the coat and hat of the Grand Army of the Republic. In the
+picture a medal pinned on to the breast of the man's coat showed.
+
+"Yes," said he, "one of the pictures is like that."
+
+Then he looked up curiously at the woman sitting beside his bed. "The
+other picture is that of a woman," he went on, "and--yes--" still
+studying her face, "I think it must be you. Only," he added, "it
+doesn't look very much like you."
+
+"No," said the woman, with a grim smile, "it doesn't. It was taken
+a good many years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and when I
+hadn't been baked for a year in this heathen climate. It's me, though."
+
+In time, Juan, that was the man's name, was so far recovered of his
+wound that he was to be discharged from the hospital and placed with
+the other able-bodied prisoners. The hospital at that time occupied
+an old convent. The day before Juan was to be discharged, Mrs. Smith
+managed her cases so that for a time no one else was left in one of
+the rooms with her but this man.
+
+"Juan," she said, when she was sure they were alone, and that no one
+was anywhere within hearing, "do you feel that I have done anything
+to help you to get well?"
+
+The man reached down, and taking one of the nurse's hands in his own
+bent over and kissed it.
+
+"Senora," he said, "I owe my life to you."
+
+"Will you do something for me, then? Something which I want done more
+than anything else in the world?"
+
+"My life is the senora's. I would that I had ten lives to give her."
+
+The woman pulled a letter from out the folds of her nurse's dress. The
+envelope was not sealed, and before she fastened it she took the
+letter which was in it out and read it over for one last time. Then,
+pulling from her waist a little red, white and blue badge pin--one
+of those patriotic emblems which so many people wear at times--she
+dropped this into the letter, sealed the envelope, and handed it to
+the Tagalog. The envelope bore no address.
+
+"I hav'n't put the name of the place on it you said you came from,"
+she told the man, "because goodness only knows how it is spelled;
+I don't. Besides that, it isn't necessary. You know the place, and
+you know the man; the man who has got my picture and his father's in
+a gold locket on his watch chain. I want you to give this letter into
+his own hands. I expect it will be rather a ticklish job for you to
+get away from here and get through the lines, but I guess you can do
+it if you try. Other men have. Don't start until you are well enough
+so you will have strength to make the whole trip."
+
+A week or so after that, one of the surgeons making his daily visit
+reported that Juan had made his escape the previous night, and up to
+that time had not been brought back.
+
+"What a shame!" said one of the other nurses. "After all the care
+you gave that man, Mrs. Smith. It does seem as if he might have had
+a little more gratitude."
+
+Mrs. Smith said nothing aloud. But to herself, when she was alone,
+she said: "Well, I suppose some folks would say that I wasn't acting
+right, but I guess I've saved the lives of enough of those men since
+I've been here so that I'm entitled to one of them if I want him."
+
+Then she went on with her work, and waited; and the waiting was harder
+than the work.
+
+
+
+An American expedition was slowly toiling across the island of
+Luzon to locate and occupy a post in the north. Four companies of
+men marched in advance, with a guard in the rear. Between them were
+the mule teams with the camp luggage and the ever present hospital
+corps. No trace of the enemy had been seen in that part of the island
+for weeks. Scouts who had gone on in advance had reported the way to
+be clear, and the force was being hurried up to get through a ravine
+which it was approaching, so it could go into camp for the night on
+high, level ground just beyond the valley.
+
+Suddenly a man's voice rang out upon the hot air; an English, speaking
+voice, strong and clear, and coming, so it seemed at first to the
+troops when they heard it, from the air above them:
+
+"Halt! Halt!" the voice cried.
+
+"Go back! There is an ambush on both sides! Save yourselves! Be--"
+
+The warning was unfinished. Those of the Americans who had located
+the sound of the words and had looked in the direction from which
+they came, had seen a white man standing on the rocky side of the
+ravine above them and in front of them. They had seen him throw up
+his arms and fall backward out of sight, leaving his last sentence
+unfinished. Then there had come the report of a gun, and then an
+attack, with scores of shouting Tagalogs swarming down the sides of
+the ravine.
+
+The skirmish was over, though, almost as soon as it had begun, and
+with little harm to any of the Americans except to such of the scouts
+as had been cut off in advance. The warning had come in time--had come
+before the advancing column had marched between the forces hidden on
+both sides of the ravine. The Tagalogs could not face the fire with
+which the Americans met them. They fled up the ravine, and up both
+sides of the gorge, into the shelter of the forest, and were gone. The
+Americans, satisfied at length that the way was clear, moved forward
+and went into camp on the ground which had previously been chosen,
+throwing out advance lines of pickets, and taking extra precautions
+to be prepared against a night attack.
+
+Early in the evening shots were heard on the outer picket line, and
+a little later two men came to the commanding officers tent bringing
+with them a native.
+
+"He was trying to come through our lines and get into the camp, sir,"
+they reported. "Two men fired at him, but missed him."
+
+"Think he's a spy?" the commander asked of another officer who was
+with him.
+
+"No, Senor, I am not a spy," the prisoner said, surprising all the
+men by speaking in English. "I have left my people, I want to be sent
+to Manila, to the American camp there."
+
+"He's a deserter," said one of the officers. Then to the men who held
+the prisoner, "Better search him."
+
+From out the prisoner's blouse one of the soldiers brought a paper,
+a sheet torn from a note book, folded, and fastened only by a red,
+white and blue badge pin stuck through the paper.
+
+The officer to whom the soldier had handed the paper pulled out the
+pin which had kept it folded, and started to open it, when he saw
+there was something written on the side through which the pin had been
+thrust. Bending down to where the camp light fell upon the writing,
+he saw that it was an address, scrawled in lead pencil:
+
+"Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse."
+
+"Do you know the woman to whom this letter is sent? he asked in
+amazement of the Tagalog from whom it had been taken.
+
+"Yes Senor."
+
+"Do you know where she is now?"
+
+"Yes, Senor. She is in a hospital not far from Manila. She is a
+good woman. My life is hers. I was there once for many, many days,
+shot through here," he placed his hand on his side, "and she made me
+well again."
+
+"Do you know who sent this letter to her?"
+
+"Yes, Senor."
+
+"Who was it?"
+
+The man hesitated.
+
+"Who was it? Answer. It is for her good I want to know."
+
+"It was her son, Senor."
+
+"Was he the man who gave us warning of the ambush today?"
+
+"Yes, Senor."
+
+The officer folded the paper, unread, and thrust the pin back through
+the folds. The enamel on the badge glistened in the camp light.
+
+"Keep the Tagalog here," he said to the men, "until I come back;"
+and walked across the camp to where the hospital tents had been set up.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Smith?" he asked of the surgeon in charge.
+
+"Taking care of the men who were wounded this afternoon."
+
+"Will you tell her that I want to see her alone in your tent, here,
+and then see that no one else comes in?"
+
+"Mrs. Smith," he said, when the nurse came in, "I have something here
+for you--a letter. It has just been brought into camp, by a native who
+did not know that you were here and who wanted to be sent to Manila
+to find you. It is not very strongly sealed, but no one has read it
+since it was brought into camp."
+
+He gave the bit of paper to the nurse, and then turned away to stand
+in the door of the tent, that he might not look at her while she read
+it. Enough of the nurse's story was known in the army now so that the
+officer could guess something of what this message might mean to her.
+
+A sound in the tent behind the officer made him turn. The woman had
+sunk down on the ground beneath the surgeon's light, and resting her
+arms upon a camp stool had hid her face.
+
+A moment later she raised her head, her face wet with tears and
+wearing an expression of mingled grief and joy, and held out the
+letter to the officer.
+
+"Read it!" she said. "Thank God!" and then, "My boy! My boy!" and
+hid her face again.
+
+"Dear mother," the scrawled note read.
+
+"I got your letter. I'm glad you wrote it. It made things plain I
+hadn't seen before. My chance has come--quicker than I had expected. I
+wish I might have seen you again, but I shan't. A column of our men
+are coming up the valley just below here, marching straight into an
+ambush. I have tried to get word to them, but I can't, because the
+Tagalogs watch me so close. They never have trusted me. The only way
+for me is to rush out when the men get near enough, and shout to them,
+and that will be the end of it all for me. I don't care, only that I
+wish I could see you again. Juan will take this letter to you. When
+you get it, and the men come back, if I save them, I think perhaps
+they will clear my name. Then you can go home.
+
+"The men are almost here. Mother, dear, good by.--Your Boy."
+
+"I wish I might have seen him," the woman said, a little later. "But
+I won't complain. What I most prayed God for has been granted me."
+
+"They'll let the charge against him drop, now, won't they? Don't you
+think he has earned it?"
+
+"I think he surely has. No braver deed has been done in all this war."
+
+"Don't try to come, now, Mrs Smith," as the nurse rose to her
+feet. "Stay here, and I will send one of the women to you."
+
+When he had done this the officer went back to where the men were
+still holding Juan between them.
+
+"Your journey is shorter than you thought," the officer said to the
+Tagalog. "Mrs. Smith is in this camp, and I have given the letter
+to her."
+
+"May I see her?" exclaimed the man.
+
+"Not now. In the morning you may. Have you seen this man, her son,
+since he was shot?"
+
+"No, Senor. He gave me the note and told me to slip into the forest
+as soon as the fight began, so as to get away without any one seeing
+me. Then I was to stay out of the way until I could get into this
+camp."
+
+"Do you know where he stood when he was shot?"
+
+"Yes, Senor."
+
+"Can you take a party of men there tonight?"
+
+"Yes, Senor; most gladly."
+
+
+
+Afterward, when it came to be known that Heber Smith would live,
+in spite of his wounds and the hours that he had lain there in the
+bushes unconscious and uncared for, there was the greatest diversity
+of opinion as to what had really saved his life.
+
+The surgeons said it was partly their skill, and partly the superb
+constitution that years of work on a New England farm had given to
+the young man. His mother believed that he had been spared for her
+sake. Heber Smith himself always said it was his mother's care that
+saved his life, while Juan never had the least doubt that the young
+soldier had been protected solely by a marvellous "anting-anting"
+which he himself had slipped unsuspected into the American soldier's
+blouse that day, before he had left him. As soon as she knew that her
+son would live, Mrs. Smith started for Washington, carrying with her
+papers which made it possible for her to be allowed to plead her case
+there as she had pleaded it in Manila. A pardon was sent back, as fast
+as wire and steamer and wire again could convey it. Heber Smith wears
+the uniform of a second lieutenant, now, won for bravery in action
+since he went back into the service; and every one who knew her in
+the Philippines, cherishes the memory of Mrs. Hannah Smith; Nurse.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTEENTH WIFE
+
+
+Mateo, my Filipino servant, was helping me sort over specimens one day
+under the thatched roof of a shed which I had hired to use for such
+work while I was on the island of Culion, when I was startled to see
+him suddenly drop the bird skin he had been working on, and fall upon
+his knees, bending his body forward, his face turned toward the road,
+until his forehead touched the floor.
+
+At first I thought he must be having some new kind of a fit, peculiar
+to the Philippine Islands, until I happened to glance up the road
+toward the town, from which my house was a little distance removed,
+and saw coming toward us a most remarkable procession.
+
+Four native soldiers walked in front, two carrying long spears, and
+two carrying antiquated seven-foot muskets, relics of a former era in
+fire arms. After the soldiers came four Visayan slaves, bearing on
+their shoulders a sort of platform covered with rugs and cushions,
+on which a woman reclined. On one side of the litter walked another
+slave, holding a huge umbrella so as to keep the sun's rays off the
+woman's face. Two more soldiers walked behind.
+
+Mateo might have been a statue, or a dead man, for all the attention
+he paid to my questions until after the procession had passed the
+house. Then, resuming a perpendicular position once more, he said,
+"That was the Sultana Ahmeya, the Sultana."
+
+Then he went on to explain that there were thirteen other sultanas, of
+assorted colors, who helped make home happy for the Sultan of Culion,
+who after all, well supplied as he might at first seem to be, was only
+a sort of fourth-class sovereign, so far as sultanas are concerned,
+since his fellow monarch on a neighboring larger island, the Sultan
+of Sulu, is said to have four hundred wives.
+
+Ahmeya, though, Mateo went on to inform me, was the only one of
+the fourteen who really counted. She was neither the oldest nor the
+youngest of the wives of the reigning ruler, but she had developed
+a mind of her own which had made her supreme in the palace, and
+besides, she was the only one of his wives who had borne a son to
+the monarch. For her own talents, and as the mother of the heir,
+the people did her willing homage.
+
+When I saw the royal cavalcade go past my door I had no idea I would
+ever have a chance to become more intimately acquainted with Her
+Majesty, but only a little while after that circumstances made it
+possible for me to see more of the royal family than had probably
+been the privilege of any other white man. How little thought I had,
+when the acquaintance began, of the strange experiences it would
+eventually lead to!
+
+At that time, in the course of collecting natural history
+specimens, most of my time for three years was spent in the island
+of Culion. Having a large stock of drugs, for use in my work, and
+quite a lot of medicines, I had doctored Mateo and two or three
+other fellows who had worked for me, when they had been ill, with
+the result that I found I had come to have a reputation for medical
+skill which sometimes was inconvenient. I had no idea how widely my
+fame had spread, though, until one morning Mateo came into my room
+and woke me, and with a face which expressed a good deal of anxiety,
+informed me that I was sent for to come to the palace.
+
+I confess I felt some concern myself, and should have felt more if I
+had had as much experience then as I had later, for one never knows
+what those three-quarters savage potentates may take it into their
+heads to do.
+
+When I found that I was sent for because the Sultan was ill,--ill unto
+death, the messenger had made Mateo believe,--and I was expected to
+doctor him, I did not feel much more comfortable, for I much doubted if
+my knowledge of diseases, and my assortment of medicines, were equal
+to coping with a serious case. If the Sultan died I would probably
+be beheaded, either for not keeping him alive, or for killing him.
+
+It was a great relief, then, when I reached the palace, and just
+before I entered the room where the sick monarch was, to hear him
+swearing vigorously, in a combination of the native and Spanish
+languages which was as picturesque as it was expressive.
+
+I found the man suffering from an acute attack of neuralgia, although
+he did not know what was the matter with him. He had not been able
+to sleep for three days and nights, and the pain, all the way up and
+down one side of his face had been so intense that he thought he was
+going to die, and almost hoped that he was. His head was tied up in a
+lot of cloths, not over clean, in which a dozen native doctor's charms
+had been folded, until the bundle was as big as four heads ought to be.
+
+As soon as I found out what was the matter I felt relieved, for I
+reckoned I could manage an attack of swelled head all right. I had
+doctored the natives enough, already, to find out that they had no
+respect for remedies which they could not feel, and so, going back
+to the house, I brought from there some extra strong liniment, some
+tincture of red pepper and a few powerful morphine pills.
+
+I gave my patient one of the pills the first thing, administering
+it in a glass of water with enough of the cayenne added to it so
+that the mixture brought tears to his eyes, and then removing the
+layers of cloth from his head, and gathering in as I did so, for my
+collection of curiosities, the various charms which I uncovered, I
+gave his head a vigorous shampooing with the liniment, taking pains to
+see that the liquor occasionally ran down into the Sultan's eyes. He
+squirmed a good deal, but I kept on until I thought it must be about
+time for the morphine to begin to take effect. I kept him on morphine
+and red pepper for three days, but when I let up on him he was cured,
+and my reputation was made.
+
+It would have been too great a nuisance to have been endured, had it
+not been that so high a degree of royal favor enabled me to pursue
+my work with a degree of success which otherwise I could never have
+hoped for.
+
+After that I used to see a good deal of the palace life. Although
+nominally Mohammedans in religion, the inhabitants of these more
+distant islands have little more than the name of the faith, and follow
+out few of its injunctions. As a result I was accorded a freedom about
+the palace which would have been impossible in such an establishment
+in almost any other country.
+
+One day the Sultan had invited me to dine with him. After the meal,
+while we were smoking, reclining in some cocoanut fibre hammocks
+swung in the shade of the palace court yard, I saw a man servant lead
+a dog through the square, and down a narrow passage way through the
+rear of the palace.
+
+"Would you like to see the 'Green Devil' eat?" my host asked.
+
+I have translated the native words he used by the term "green devil,"
+because that represents the idea of the original better than any
+other words I know of, I had not the slightest conception as to who
+or what the individual referred to might be; but I said at once that
+I would be very glad indeed to see him eat.
+
+My host swung out of the hammock,--he was a superbly strong and
+vigorous man, now that he was in health again,--and led the way
+through the passage. Following him I found myself in another court
+yard, larger than the first, and with more trees in it. Beneath one
+of these trees, in a stout cage of bamboo, was the biggest python
+I ever saw. He must have been fully twenty-five feet long. The cage
+was large enough to give the snake a chance to move about in it, and
+when we came in sight he was rolling from one end to the other with
+head erect, eyes glistening, and the light shimmering on his glossy
+scales in a way which made it easy to see why he had been given his
+name. I learned later that he had not been fed for a month, and that
+he would not be fed again until another month had passed. Like all
+of his kind he would touch none but live food.
+
+The wretched dog, who seemed to guess the fate in store for him,
+hung back in the rope tied about his neck, and crouched flat to the
+ground, too frightened even to whine.
+
+The servant unlocked a door in the side of the cage and thrust the
+poor beast in. I am not ashamed to say that I turned my head away. It
+was only a dog, but it might have been a human being, so far as the
+reptile, or the half-savage man at my side, would have cared.
+
+When I looked again, the dog was only a crushed mass of bones and
+flesh, about which the snake was still winding and tightening coil
+after coil.
+
+"We need not wait," the Sultan said. "It will be an hour before he
+will swallow the food. You can come out again."
+
+I did as he suggested. It was a wonder to me, as it is to every one,
+how a snake's throat can be distended enough to swallow whole an object
+so large as this dog, but in some way the reptile had accomplished the
+feat. The meal over, the huge creature had coiled down as still almost
+as if dead. He would lie in that way, now, they told me, for days.
+
+It was while I stood watching the snake that Ahmeya came through
+the square, leading her boy by the hand. The apartments of the royal
+wives were built around this inner yard. This was the first time I
+had seen the heir to the throne. He was a handsome boy, and looked
+like his mother. Ahmeya was tall, for a native woman, and carried
+herself with a dignity which showed that she felt the honor of her
+position. Mateo had told me that she had a decided will of her own,
+and, so the palace gossips said, ruled the establishment, and her
+associate sultanas, with an unbending hand.
+
+It was not very long after I had seen the green devil eat that
+Mateo told me there had been another wedding at the palace. Mateo
+was an indefatigable news-gatherer, and an incorrigible gossip. As
+the society papers would have expressed it, this wedding had been "a
+very quiet affair." The Sultan had happened to see a Visayan girl of
+uncommon beauty, on one of the smaller islands, one day, had bought
+her of her father for two water buffalos, and had installed her at
+the palace as wife number fifteen.
+
+For the time being the new-comer was said to be the royal favorite,
+a condition of affairs which caused the other fourteen wives as little
+concern as their objections, if they had expressed any, would probably
+have caused their royal husband. So far as Ahmeya was concerned,
+she never minded a little thing like that, but included the last
+arrival in the same indifferent toleration which she had extended to
+her predecessors.
+
+I saw the new wife only once.--I mean,--yes I mean that.--I saw her as
+the king's wife only once. She was a handsome woman, with a certain
+insolent disdain of those about her which indicated that she knew
+her own charms, and perhaps counted too much on their being permanent.
+
+That summer my work took me away from the island. I went to Manila,
+and eventually to America. When I finally returned to Culion a year
+had passed.
+
+I had engaged Mateo, before I left, to look out for such property
+as I left behind, and had retained my old house. I found him waiting
+for me, and with everything in good order. That is one good thing to
+be said about the natives. An imagined wrong or insult may rankle in
+their minds for months, until they have a chance to stab you in the
+back. They will lie to you at times with the most unblushing nerve,
+often when the truth would have served their ends so much better that
+it seems as if they must have been doing mendacious gymnastics simply
+to keep themselves in practice; but they will hardly ever steal. If
+they do, it will be sometime when you are looking squarely at them,
+carrying a thing off from under your very nose with a cleverness
+which they seem to think, and you can hardly help feel yourself,
+makes them deserve praise instead of blame. I have repeatedly left
+much valuable property with them, as I did in this case with Mateo,
+and have come back to find every article just as I had left it.
+
+Mateo was glad to see me. "Oh Senor," he began, before my clothes were
+fairly changed, and while he was settling my things in my bed room,
+"there is so much to tell you."
+
+I knew he would be bursting with news of what had happened during my
+absence. "Such goings on," he continued, folding my travelling clothes
+into a tin trunk, where the white ants could not get at them. "You
+never heard the likes of it."
+
+I am translating very freely, for I have noticed that the thoughts
+expressed by the Philippine gossip are very similar to those of his
+fellow in America, or Europe, or anywhere else, no matter how much
+the words may differ.
+
+"The new Sultana, the handsome Visayan girl, has given birth to a son,
+and has so bewitched the Sultan by her good looks and craftiness
+that he has decreed her son, and not Ahmeya's, to be the heir to
+the throne. She rules the palace now, and when her servants bear her
+through the streets the people bow down to her." He added, with a look
+behind him to see that no one overheard, "Because they dare not do
+otherwise. In their hearts they love Ahmeya, and hate this vain woman."
+
+"How does Ahmeya take it?" I asked.
+
+"Hardly, people think, although she makes no cry. She goes not through
+the streets of the town, now, but stays shut in her own rooms, with
+her women and the boy."
+
+A furious beating against the bamboo walls of my sleeping room,
+and wild cries from some one on the ground outside, awoke me one
+morning when I had been back in Culion less than a week. The house
+in which I slept, like most of the native houses in the Philippines,
+was built on posts, several feet above the ground, for the sake of
+coolness and as a protection against snakes and such vermin.
+
+It was very early, not yet sunrise. A servant of the Sultan's, gray
+with fright, was pounding on the walls of the house with a long spear
+to wake me, begging me, when I opened the lattice, to come to the
+palace at once.
+
+I thought the monarch must have had some terrible attack, and
+wondered what it could be, but while we were hurrying up the street
+the messenger managed to make me understand that the Sultan was not
+at the palace at all, but gone the day before on board the royal
+proa for a state visit to a neighboring island from which he exacted
+yearly tribute. Later I learned that he had tried to have the Visayan
+woman go with him, but that she had wilfully refused to go. What
+was the matter at the palace the ruler being gone, I could not make
+out. When I asked this of the man who had come for me, he fell into
+such a palsy of fear that he could say nothing. When I came to know,
+later, that he was the night guard at the palace, and remembered what
+he must have seen, I did not wonder.
+
+At the palace no one was astir. The man had come straight for me,
+stopping to rouse no one else. I had saved the Sultan's life. At
+least he thought so. Might I not do even more?
+
+My guide took me straight through the first court yard, and down
+the narrow passage into the inner yard, around which were built
+the apartments of the woman. Ahmeya, I knew, lived in the rooms at
+one end of the square. The man led me towards the opposite end of
+the enclosure. Beside an open door he stood aside for me to enter,
+saying, as he did so, "Senor, help us."
+
+The sun had risen, now, and shining full upon a lattice in the upper
+wall, flooded the room with a soft clear light.
+
+The body of the Visayan woman, or rather what had been a body, lay
+on the floor in the center of the room, a shapeless mass of crushed
+bones and flesh. An enormous python lay coiled in one corner. His
+mottled skin glistened in the morning light, but he did not move,
+and his eyes were tight shut, as were those of the "green devil"
+after I had seen him feed.
+
+I looked backward, across the court yard. The door of the big bamboo
+cage beneath the trees was open. I turned to the room again and looked
+once more. I knew now why the night guard's face was ash-colored,
+and why he could not speak.
+
+For the child of the Visayan woman I could not see.
+
+
+
+
+
+"OUR LADY OF PILAR"
+
+
+"How very singular! What do you suppose they are doing?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. The American mind is unequal to grappling
+with the problem of what the natives are doing out here, most of the
+time. They seem to be praying. Or are they having a thanksgiving?"
+
+"I don't know. All women, too!"
+
+The young American woman and the officer who was her escort halted
+their horses to watch better the group of people of whom they had been
+speaking. The officer was a lieutenant of the American forces stationed
+in Zamboanga, the oldest and most important city in Mindanao, the
+headquarters of the United States military district in the Philippines
+known as the Department of Mindanao and Jolo. The young woman was
+the daughter of one of the older officers of the department, just
+come to Zamboanga the day before, and in this morning's ride having
+her first chance to see the strange old city to which her father had
+been transferred from Manila a few weeks before.
+
+In the course of this ride the young people had reached Fort Pilar, at
+one end of the town, a weather-beaten old fortification built years and
+years before by the Spaniards as a protection against their implacable
+foes, the Moros, who waged continual warfare against them from the
+southern islands of the archipelago. Circling the stone walls of the
+fort the riders had come upon a group of as many as fifty Visayan
+women kneeling on the ground, their faces turned devoutly toward a
+stone tablet let into the walls.
+
+An American soldier was doing sentry duty not far away. "Wait here,
+Miss Allenthorne," Lieutenant Chickering said, "and I'll find out
+from that man over there what they are doing. He's been here long
+enough so that probably he knows by this time." The officer cantered
+his pony over to the sentry's station. The American girl, left to
+herself, slipped down from her pony, and hooking the bridle rein into
+her elbow, walked a little nearer to the women. They did not seem to
+mind her in the least, and one of them--a handsome young woman near
+her--when she looked up and saw that the stranger was an American,
+smiled, and said something in a language which Miss Allenthorne did
+not understand; but from the expression on her face the American felt
+sure that what the woman said was meant as a welcome.
+
+Something which this Visayan woman did a moment later excited Miss
+Allenthorne's curiosity to a still higher pitch. The native woman drew
+a small photograph from the folds of her "camisa," and kissed it. Then
+she put it down on the ground between herself and the wall, and turned
+to the tablet above it a face lighted with a radiance which any woman
+seeing would have known could have come from love alone. When she had
+finished, and had risen to her feet, she saw that the young American
+"senorita" was still watching her.
+
+The two woman had been born with the earth between them, and with
+centuries of difference in traditions and training. Neither could
+understand the words which the other spoke, but when their eyes met
+there went from the heart of each to the heart of the other a message
+which did not require words to make itself understood.
+
+With a beautiful grace of manner and expression, the Visayan went
+to the other woman, and again speaking as if she thought her words
+could be understood, held out the picture which she had kissed,
+for the stranger to look at.
+
+The photograph was that of a young American officer, in a lieutenant's
+uniform.
+
+
+
+Grace Allenthorne and her mother had lived in Manila for several
+months. As the daughter of one of the oldest and most highly respected
+officers in the service, and as a beautiful and attractive young woman,
+she had naturally been popular in the life of the military element
+of Manila's society. If she had herself been asked to describe the
+situation in Manila, Grace would have said that she liked no one
+officer better than another. They had all been "so nice" to her. With
+the exception of two of their number, however, the officers with whom
+she had ridden and talked and danced, would have said, if they had
+expressed their opinion of the matter, that they were all out of it
+except Lieutenant Chickering and Lieutenant Day; and some of them,
+among themselves, possibly may have made quiet bets as to which one
+of these two men would win in the end.
+
+Then there came one of those official wavings of red tape in the air,
+which army officers' families learn to dread as signals of approaching
+trouble, and Colonel Allenthorne was transferred from Luzon to
+Mindanao; and among the troops sent with him were the companies of
+the rival lieutenants.
+
+When the General sent back word that Zamboanga was a quiet city, with a
+fair climate and comfortable quarters, his wife and daughter followed
+him. If either of the young officers flattered himself that Grace was
+coming on his account, and that he was going to be made aware of her
+preference for himself on her arrival in Mindanao, he was disappointed.
+
+Lieutenant Chickering was on duty when Miss Allenthorne arrived,
+and she devoted two hours that evening to hearing Lieutenant Day
+describe the city as he had found it. The next morning Lieutenant
+Day was on duty, and she went to ride with Lieutenant Chickering,
+possibly to learn if the information she had been favoured with the
+night before had been correct.
+
+
+
+Lieutenant Chickering cantered back from the sentry's post. Finding
+his companion dismounted, he jumped down from his own pony and came
+to join her. The native woman had gone her way toward the city before
+he returned, smiling a good-bye to Miss Allenthorne when she found
+that her words were not understood, and hiding the photograph in her
+bosom as she turned to go.
+
+"I've found out all about it, Miss Allenthorne," the Lieutenant
+exclaimed.
+
+"There is a story which it seems the natives believe, that years ago
+there was once, where we now stand, a river which ran down past the
+fort and emptied into the sea. To give access to this river there
+was then a gate in the wall of the fort, directly opposite where we
+are now. Over the gate was a marble statue of a saint, who was called
+'Our Lady of Pilar.'
+
+"One night a soldier who was on sentry duty at the gate saw a white
+figure pass out before him. He challenged it, and when he got no answer
+challenged again and again. When the third summons brought no response,
+he aimed his gun at the figure and fired.
+
+"In the morning this sentry was found at his post, stone dead, and the
+statue of the saint was gone. What was still more strange, the river
+which had always flowed past the gate had dried up in the night, and
+has never been seen since. After a time they built up the gate into
+a solid part of the wall, as you see it now; because as there was
+then no river here, there was no need of the gate. This had hardly
+been done when the tablet which we see there now made its appearance
+miraculously. All these strange manifestations attracted so much
+attention to the place that this shrine was set up here, and now for
+years it has been a favourite place for devout worshippers--especially
+women--to come to pray and to give thanks for blessings which they
+have received.
+
+"It's interesting, isn't it?"
+
+"Very," assented Miss Allenthorne, when the officer had finished;
+and then she added, almost immediately, "Don't you think it's getting
+very warm? Wouldn't we better ride back now?"
+
+"Just as you say," the officer answered. Then he helped her to mount,
+mounted his own horse, and they rode home.
+
+That evening Miss Allenthorne was invisible. When Lieutenant Day
+called, her mother explained that the young woman had a headache,
+possibly from riding too far in the sun that morning.
+
+Alone in her room the young woman heard the officer's inquiry and
+her mother's excuses, for the bamboo walls of a Philippine house let
+conversation be heard from one end of the house to the other. Crushing
+in both hands the handkerchief which she had been dipping into iced
+water to bind about her forehead, she flung it impatiently from her,
+thinking bitterly to herself as she did so how foolish it was to bind
+up one's head when it was really one's heart that was aching.
+
+For alone in her darkened room that afternoon, the young woman had
+acknowledged to herself--what perhaps up to that time had been almost
+as much of a problem to her as to other people--which one of the young
+officers she really cared for. She knew now that the love of Lieutenant
+Day meant everything to her, and the love of the other man nothing.
+
+And it was Lieutenant Day's picture which she had seen the Visayan
+woman kiss.
+
+One day General Allenthorne sat on the verandah of his house with
+an American acquaintance, the agent of a business firm, who had been
+sent to the Philippine Islands to see what opportunities there might
+be for trade there.
+
+Some women walked along the street below the house, carrying heavy
+water jars poised on their heads.
+
+"Queer country, isn't it?" said the visitor.
+
+"Yes," said the General. "A body never knows what may happen to
+him. Probably those women we see down there are slaves. Seeing them
+made me think of a funny thing I heard of today, which happened to
+one of my men a little while ago.
+
+"A young officer hired a native man for a servant. One day the fellow
+came to the Lieutenant in a great state of mind, begging the officer
+to help him. It seemed he had a sweetheart who was a Visayan slave
+girl owned by a Moro. The man who owned the girl was going to leave
+the city and take all his property, including this slave girl, with
+him. Pedro--that was the officer's boy--wanted 'the great American
+Senor' to say she should not go. Some of the natives seem to have
+the most wonderful confidence in the power of the Americans to do
+anything and everything.
+
+"The officer told his boy he had no power to prevent the man's moving
+and taking his property with him; but he happened to ask how much
+the girl was worth. How much do you think the fellow said? Fifteen
+dollars! And he went on to explain that this was an unusually high
+price, he knew, but that this girl was young and handsome and clever
+at work. Of course he thought so, for he was in love with her.
+
+"Well, I suppose the Lieutenant was flush, or felt generous, or perhaps
+something had happened to put him in an unusually serene frame of
+mind. He handed over fifteen dollars, and told Pedro to go and buy
+the girl and marry her; which he did, and has been the happiest man
+alive ever since. He is really grateful, too, and there isn't another
+officer in the service that is waited on as Lieutenant Day is. The
+funniest part of it all is, though, that he just found out a day or
+two ago, that in his gratitude Pedro had stolen one of his master's
+photographs to give to the Visayan girl he had married, so that she
+could see what their benefactor looked like, and she has been going out
+with it every day to an altar, or shrine, or something of that sort in
+the wall of an old fort here, where the native women go to worship,
+to pray to the saint there to shower all kinds of blessings on the
+American Senor who brought all this happiness to her and her husband.
+
+"The boys have guyed Day so much about it, since they found it out,
+that he swears he will discharge the man, and have him hauled up for
+stealing the picture into the bargain. If he does, the woman will be
+likely to think that there is something the matter with the saint,
+I reckon, or that her prayers havn't found favour."
+
+For once the wicker walls of a bamboo house had a merit all their
+own. At least that was what a certain young woman thought, when she
+could not help hearing this conversation in the room in which she
+had shut herself for the afternoon.
+
+That night at dinner Miss Grace Allenthorne, was so radiant that even
+her father noticed it.
+
+"What have you been doing, Grace?" he said. "What's the reason you
+feel so well, tonight? I havn't seen you look so fine for a month."
+
+"Oh, nothing, father," said the girl. "I don't know of any special
+reason. I think that you just imagine it."
+
+Which was, of course, a very wrong thing for her to say; for she knew
+perfectly well what the reason was.
+
+While they were still at table a messenger came post haste for General
+Allenthorne, with word that he was wanted at once at headquarters. He
+was absent nearly all night.
+
+In the morning it was known that an outpost in the northern part of
+the island had been surprised and almost captured. The enemy was still
+in force about the place and threatening it. A loyal native had crept
+through the lines to bring word and ask for help. A relief force had
+been made up and sent at once. Lieutenant Day was among those who
+volunteered to go, and had gone.
+
+Ten days of horrible anxiety followed. Then word came that the
+relief party had reached the post in time. The forces surrounding
+the place had been scattered, and the post was safe. There had been
+a sharp fight, though, and among those who had been badly wounded
+was Lieutenant Day.
+
+Of course he got well. No man could help it, with four such nurses
+as Mrs. Allenthorne and Mrs. Allenthorne's daughter Grace, and Pedro
+and Pedro's Visayan wife Anita.
+
+Just what Grace told her mother, which led that worthy person to
+become responsible for the young officer's recovery, no one ever
+knew except the two women themselves, but in addition to being a
+motherly-hearted woman, Mrs. Allenthorne was a soldier's daughter as
+well as a soldier's wife, so perhaps it was not necessary to explain
+so many things to her as it would have been to some people.
+
+Nobody ever knew--or at least never told--what explanation the young
+woman made to the Lieutenant, when he came back to consciousness
+and found her helping to care for him. Perhaps she did not
+explain. Possibly the explanations made themselves, or else none
+were needed.
+
+At any rate, the young man got well, and since then he has been
+known to say--although this was in the strictest confidence to a very
+particular person--that he should always regard the Visayan woman's
+prayers before "Our Lady of Pilar" with the profoundest gratitude,
+because the greatest blessing of his whole life had come to him
+through this woman's praying for him outside the walls of the old fort.
+
+
+
+
+
+A QUESTION OF TIME
+
+
+"The native pilot who is to take the gunboat Utica around from Ilo Ilo
+to Capiz is a traitor. I have just discovered indisputable proofs of
+that fact. He has agreed to run the gunboat aground on a ledge near
+one of the Gigantes Islands, on which a force of insurgents is to
+be hidden, large enough to overpower the men on the gunboat in her
+disabled condition. Do not let her leave Ilo Ilo until you have a
+new pilot, and one you are sure of.
+
+"Demauny."
+
+
+Captain James Demauny, of the American army in the Philippine Islands,
+folded the dispatch which he had just written, and sealed it. Then,
+calling an orderly to him he said, "Send Sergeant Johnson to me."
+
+Captain Demauny's company was then at Pasi, a small inland town in
+the island of Panay. He had been dispatched by the American general
+commanding at Ilo Ilo, the chief seaport of Panay, to march to
+Capiz, a seaport town on the opposite side of the island, to assist
+from the land side a small force of Americans besieged there by the
+natives, while the gunboat Utica was to steam around the northeastern
+promontory of the island and cooperate from the water side of the town,
+in its relief.
+
+The distance across the island was about fifty miles, while that
+by water, by the route which the Utica must traverse, was about two
+hundred miles. Captain Demauny, starting first, had covered half the
+march laid out for him, without incident, until, halting at Pasi,
+half way across the island and well up in the mountains, he had been
+so fortunate as to obtain the information which he was about to send
+back to the commander at Ilo Ilo. Panay had been, up to this time, one
+of the most quiet islands in the group. He had met with no opposition
+in his march, so far, and it was believed that the only natives on
+the island who were under arms were those living in the northeastern
+part of the territory. It was a force of these that had invested Capiz.
+
+"Sergeant Johnson, sir," the orderly reported.
+
+"Very well. Send him in."
+
+A young man, wearing a faded brown duck uniform, tightly buttoned
+leggings, and a wide-rimmed gray hat, entered the tent.
+
+"I have sent for you, sergeant," said Captain Demauny, "for two
+reasons. One is that I want a man who is brave, and one whom I
+can trust."
+
+The sergeant bent his head slightly, in acknowledgement of the implied
+compliment, his cheeks looking a trifle darker shade of brown, where
+the blood had flushed the skin beneath its double deep coat of tan.
+
+"The other reason," the officer went on, "is that I want a man of
+whose muscle and endurance as a runner, and whose skill as a boatman,
+I have had some proof."
+
+In spite of the difference in rank, and the seriousness of the
+situation, which the officer knew and the man guessed, the two men
+looked at each other and smiled. For one was a Harvard man, and the
+other had come from Yale.
+
+"The gunboat Utica is to leave Ilo Ilo at midnight, tonight. It is
+of the very greatest importance that this dispatch," handing him
+the letter, "be delivered to the American general at Ilo Ilo before
+the vessel gets under way. I entrust it to you, to see that it is
+delivered.
+
+"You ought to have no trouble in getting there in ample season," the
+captain continued, spreading out a map so that the other man could see
+it. "I cannot spare any men for an escort for you, because my force
+is already far too small for what we have to do. Instead of following
+back the road we took in coming here--which would be impassable for
+any one but a man on foot, even if I had a horse for you, which I
+have not--I think you can make better time by another route.
+
+"Six miles from here," pointing to the map, "you will reach the same
+river which we crossed at a point farther up the stream. Get a boat
+there and go down the river some fifteen or twenty miles, until you
+come to a native village built at the head of steep falls in the
+stream. I am told that until you reach there the river is navigable,
+and that the current is so swift much of the way that you can make
+rapid progress. At that village you will have to leave your boat,
+but from that place you will find a clearly marked path to Ilo Ilo.
+
+"The quicker you start, the better; and, as I have told you, I trust
+it to you to see that the general has the dispatch before the Utica
+leaves port."
+
+It was ten o'clock in the forenoon when the sergeant had been sent
+for to come to headquarters. Half an hour later he had started, the
+letter tightly wrapped in a bit of rubber blanket before he had placed
+it inside his jacket, for he had already had enough experience with
+the native boats to know how unstable they would be in the current
+of a rapid river.
+
+The five miles from Pasi to the river were easily made, in spite of
+the fact that it was midday, for there was a good path, which, for
+nearly all the distance, was shaded by lofty trees. When he reached
+the river the sergeant bought from a man whom he found there a native
+"banca," for three dollars, a sum of money which would make a native
+rich. In this boat he started on his voyage down the river.
+
+A native "banca" is a "dug-out," a canoe hollowed out from the trunk
+of a tree. It is propelled and guided by a short, broad-bladed paddle,
+and is as unstable as the lightest racing shell, although not any
+where nearly so easy to send through the water.
+
+It was unfortunate for the sergeant that he did not know--what
+he could not, since the map did not show it--that the place where
+the path touched the river first was on the upper side of a huge
+"ox-bow" bend. If he had kept on by land, a third of a mile's walk
+farther through the swamp would have brought him to the river again,
+at a point to reach which by water, following the river's windings,
+he would have to paddle three or four miles.
+
+Another thing which was unfortunate; that he could not know the
+nature of the man from whom he bought the "banca," any better than
+he could know the nature of the river, and so did not suspect that he
+was dealing with a "tulisane," to whom the little bag of money which
+the officer had shown when he had paid for the boat had looked like
+boundless wealth, to see which was to plan to possess.
+
+A "tulisane" is to the Philippine Islands what a brigand is to Italy,
+a bandit to Spain, a highwayman to England, and a train-robber to
+America; a man who lives by his wits, and stops at no means to gain
+his object. The "banca," by the way, was stolen property.
+
+This man would have stabbed the American soldier when he stooped to
+step cautiously into the slippery boat, and taken the purse from his
+dead body, had he not been far-sighted enough to see that the purse
+might be had, and much more money beside.
+
+The "tulisane" knew that the American soldiers were at Pasi. Although
+he did not find it best to come to town himself, in general, he never
+had any trouble finding men to go there for him, and bring him news,
+or carry messages. No bandit leader who promptly carves an ear off the
+man who does his errands grudgingly is half so feared as a Filipino
+"tulisane" whom his fellows know to be the possessor of a powerful
+"anting-anting." And this man's "anting-anting" was famous for the
+wonders which it had done.
+
+The "tulisane" knew that the American soldiers were at Pasi; and that
+the man who led them lived in one of the white tents they had set
+up there. This man in the brown clothes, which looked so tight that
+it made the Filipino tired just to look at them, could be no common
+soldier, else he would not be paying three big silver dollars for a
+"banca." If anything was to happen to this man--that is if he was to
+disappear, and still not be dead, and the officer in the white tent
+should know of it--the leader of the white soldiers would no doubt
+pay much money to have his man brought safely back. Consequently the
+man in the brown clothes, with the fat money purse, should be made
+to disappear.
+
+That was the way the "tulisane" reasoned. It was the three dollars,
+the rest of the money in the purse, and the ransom which the leader
+of the white men would pay, which influenced the Filipino. It was
+not that the Asiatic highwayman cared a leaf of a forest tree for
+patriotism. So long as he got the money, white men and brown men were
+all alike to him, American soldiers and Filipino insurgents.
+
+So the native, going into the forest, a little way back from the river,
+looked until he found a tree the roots of which growing out from well
+up the trunk had made a sort of great wooden drum. Taking a stout
+stick of hard wood which had been leaned against the tree,--he had been
+there before,--he struck the hollow tree three heavy blows, the sound
+of which went echoing off through the forest. Then the man listened.
+
+Not long; for from far, very far away, there came an answer, one blow,
+and then, after a moment's pause, two more. The drum beats which
+followed, and the pauses for the faint replies, were like listening
+to a giant's telegraph.
+
+The soldier, paddling steadily out around the river's winding course,
+heard the noise and wondered curiously what it was. The natives who
+heard it said, "The trees are talking," meaning that some one was
+making them talk. To the "tulisane" the sounds meant that he was
+bringing his partner to help him, just as at night the far-off,
+long-drawn cry of a panther calls the creature's mate to share
+the prey.
+
+Sergeant Johnson, still paddling, after he would have said that with
+the help of the current he had put four good miles of the river behind
+him, saw a tiny ripple in the water ahead of the boat, but in a stream
+so rapid thought nothing of it.
+
+An instant later a cocoanut fibre rope, stretched taut across the
+river and just below the surface of the water, had turned his skittish
+boat bottom upward. The "tulisane," you see, had seen the sergeant's
+revolver, and thought wisest to attack him wet.
+
+Drenched, blowing for breath, before he knew what had happened, the
+soldier found himself dragged to the bank, disarmed, robbed, his hands
+bound behind him, and his feet hobbled. He could speak Spanish and
+so could the "tulisanes." Words told him that his captors, only two
+in number, meant him to march, hobbled as he was, along a path which
+they pointed out; but it took several sharp pricks from a "campilan"
+which one of them carried, to make him start. For the path led away
+from the river, away from Pasi, from Ilo Ilo and the Utica, which he
+would have given his life itself rather than fail to reach in time.
+
+Only a little way back from the river the path began to leave the low
+land, mounting up to the hills among which the "tulisanes" had their
+camp. Sometimes one of the brigands led the way, with the prisoner
+between them, sometimes both drove him before them, secure in the
+knowledge that in his helpless condition he could not escape. The
+captain's message, in its rubber case, still lay undisturbed and dry
+within the messenger's jacket. For that he was glad, although his heart
+sank as every step carried him farther away from the destination of
+the dispatch, and from the chance of its being delivered in season.
+
+The means which providence uses to accomplish the ends which it desires
+are marvellous, and those of us who do not believe in providence say,
+"a strange coincidence."
+
+The day before, back among the mountains of Panay, a little old Montese
+woman, who had never heard of God, or of America, and whose only dress
+had been thirty yards of fine bamboo plaiting coiled round and round
+her body, had died.
+
+When the dead body had been set properly upright beneath the tiny hut
+which had been the woman's home, and food and drink placed beside
+it for the long journey which the spirit was to take, the hut was
+abandoned, as is the custom of the tribe, and the men of the family,
+the woman's sons and nephews, started out with freshly sharpened
+lances and "mechetes."
+
+For this is the only religion of the Monteses; that no one must be left
+to go alone upon the long journey. And so, when one of a family dies,
+the men relatives do not stay their hands until some one,--the first
+person met,--is slain by them to go on the journey as an escort. Only
+if they seek three days through the wood, and find no human being,
+then, after the third day, a beast may be slain, and the law of blood
+still be satisfied.
+
+The sons and nephews of the Montese woman had marched for thirty-six
+hours, and the steel of their weapons had not been dimmed by any
+moisture other than the dew, when, suddenly rounding a turn in the
+mountain path, they met three men.
+
+The first of the three at that moment was the "tulisane" leader,
+and him, in thirty seconds, they had driven six lances through. His
+partner, with a scream of terror, dashed into the trackless forest and
+disappeared. He need not. The demand for a sacrifice was appeased,
+and the men who had killed the "tulisane" cared as little for his
+companion as they did for the white man who had been his prisoner. All
+they wanted, now, was to get back to the Montese country, and to
+the new huts which their women would have been building in their
+absence. The white man's words they could not understand, but his
+gestures were intelligible, and before they parted, he to hurry back
+towards the river and they towards the Montese country, they had
+cut the cords which bound the soldier's hands and hobbled his feet,
+and thus had left him free to make such haste as he could.
+
+Even then the afternoon was well nigh gone when the messenger
+reached the river at the place where he had been dragged from it;
+and practically all his journey was yet before him, wearied as he was.
+
+For once, though, fortune favored him. His dug-out had grounded on a
+sandy island hardly a dozen rods below where it had been overturned,
+and swimming out to it, he soon had righted it and was on his way
+again.
+
+At first the forest on each side was a tropic swamp. Then the river
+grew more swift, with here and there rapids in which it took all his
+skill with his clumsy paddle to keep his boat from being upset. The
+ground had begun to grow higher here, and back from the banks there
+were rank growths of hemp and palm trees.
+
+A few miles farther, and he was in the mountains, the river
+winding about like a lane of water between walls which were almost
+perpendicular, and covered with the densest, bright green foliage,
+in which parrots croaked hoarsely and monkeys chattered sleepily as
+they settled themselves for the night. The walls of the living canon
+grew narrower and steeper. The river here was as still as a lake, and
+the current so sluggish that only his labour with the paddle sent the
+"banca" forward. It grew dark quickly and fast, down in the bottom
+of this mountain gorge, and by and by the twilight glow on the tops
+of the banks, when he would peer up at them, grew fainter.
+
+The soldier strained his eyes to look ahead. Would the living green
+canons of that river never end? It was dark now, except that the stars
+in the narrow line of sky above the gorge sent down light enough to
+make the surface of the water gleam faintly and mark out his course.
+
+He drew his paddle from the water, and holding it so that the drops
+which trickled from it would make no noise, listened breathlessly for
+the sound of the falls which marked the site of the village he was
+to find, and at it leave his boat for the land again. A night bird
+screamed in the forest, and then there was utter silence, until a
+soft splash in the water beside him revealed the ugly head of a huge
+black crocodile following the dug-out.
+
+By and by the stars in the lane of sky above grew dim, and a stronger
+light, which faintly illuminated the river gorge, told him that
+the full moon had risen, although not yet high enough to light his
+course directly. After a time the gorge grew wider and its sides less
+steep and high; and then, at last, he heard the roar of the falls,
+and found the village, and had landed.
+
+What time it might be now the sergeant did not dare to guess. A sleepy
+native pointed out to him the path, stared, when the stranger said
+he must hurry on to Ilo Ilo that night, and flatly refusing to be
+his guide, went back to bed.
+
+The forest path was rankly wet with night dew, and dimly lighted
+by the moon. The soldier hurried forward, only to find that in his
+haste he had missed the main path. Slowly and anxiously he retraced
+his way until he found the right road again, and then went forward
+slowly enough now to go with care.
+
+And so, at last, he saw before him the city of Ilo Ilo, only to learn,
+when he was challenged by a picket, that it was one o'clock and that
+the Utica had steamed out of the harbour an hour before.
+
+Useless as he feared the dispatch might be now, Sergeant Johnson
+insisted that it be delivered at once, and that he be given an
+opportunity to ask to be allowed to tell the general why he was so
+late. When that officer, roused from sleep, had read the dispatch and
+heard the story briefly, for there were other things to be thought of
+then, he told the young man, "You have done well," for he knew the
+ways of Filipino "tulisanes," "and after all perhaps you may not be
+too late."
+
+But before he explained what he meant by the last part of his sentence,
+the general called for one of his aids, and as soon as the man could
+be brought, hastily gave him certain orders with instructions that
+they were to be communicated to the officers whom they concerned,
+as quickly as was possible, regardless of how sound asleep those
+gentlemen might be.
+
+Then, because he was at heart a kindly man, and because he felt that
+the water-soaked, thorn-torn soldier before him, pale with weariness
+and anxiety, had done his best, the general told him what was the
+nature of the dispatch, and why, even then, he might yet be in time.
+
+For by another of the fortunate dispensations of providence, or if
+you please, by a strange coincidence, that very afternoon another
+American gunboat had unexpectedly steamed into the harbour of Ilo
+Ilo and dropped anchor.
+
+The general had sent messages to the commander of the Ogdensburgh,
+explaining the situation to him, and as soon as that officer understood
+the matter he replied, "You did just right."
+
+"We will start in pursuit of the Utica as soon as we can get up steam,
+and do our best to overtake her."
+
+Could they overtake her? That was the question. She had a good three
+hours start, for daylight was breaking before the Ogdensburgh could be
+got under way, and the registered speed of the boats was about equal.
+
+At any rate there was doubt enough as to what the result would be
+so that when the Ogdensburgh reached the town of Concepcion, fifty
+miles up the coast from Ilo Ilo, and the Utica was seen to be lying
+at anchor in the harbour there, the commander of the Ogdensburgh said
+words which were as thankful as they were emphatic. For just beyond
+Concepcion harbour began the narrow channels of the Gigantes Islands,
+in some of which he had feared to find the gunboat wrecked.
+
+When the captain of the Utica came to know why he was pursued, and what
+he had escaped, he was as grateful for the faulty cylinder head which
+had delayed him as, the night before, he had been exasperated by it.
+
+The pilot, charged with his treachery, proved at once that the charge
+was true, by turning traitor again and offering to buy the safety
+of his own neck by guiding the boats to where they could shell the
+woods in which the natives were hidden.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SPIRIT OF MT. APO
+
+
+From the deck of any vessel passing up the southeast coast of Mindanao,
+the voyager can see the gold-crowned summit of Apo, rising like a
+gilded cone high above the dense vegetation of the island at its base.
+
+Next to Luzon, on which the city of Manila is situated, Mindanao is
+the largest of all the islands of the Philippine archipelago. Lying as
+it does far to the southeast, and near the Sulu Islands, the Moros,
+as the venturesome Sulus are called, invaded Mindanao more than two
+hundred years ago, and gradually crept farther and farther along the
+coasts and up the river valleys, waging intermittent warfare against
+the Visayans who had come from the west to settle on the island,
+and against the natives that lived inland, and keeping up constant
+relentless war upon the Spaniards who claimed the sovereignty of
+the island. There are few islands of its size in the world where
+so many different kinds of people live, and perhaps no other where
+so many wild deeds have been done. Until within the last two years,
+a man's will there has been likely to be his only law.
+
+Nature has done much for the island. The soil is of incalculable
+richness. Fruits and grains grow luxuriantly where the ground is
+turned over, and as if to make the natives laugh at the need of such
+labour the forests yield fruits and nuts with lavish generosity. Deer
+and buffalo run wild, and numberless varieties of pigeons live in
+the trees.
+
+Mount Apo, in the extreme southeastern part of the island, and almost
+upon the coast, is the loftiest mountain in the archipelago. Its
+height is usually estimated to be not far from ten thousand feet. A
+spiral of steam drifting up from the sulphur-crowned summit of the
+mountain shows that fires still linger in its bosom, but for many
+years it has been quiet, and at no time does history show that it has
+broken forth in fury to wreak the awful destruction that is written
+down against some of the volcanoes of these islands.
+
+My work as a naturalist had several times brought me where I could
+see Apo, and each time I had been more and more fascinated by it,
+and more desirous of climbing to its top.
+
+When I began to talk of making the ascent, though, I found it would
+be no easy matter. Not only were the sides of the mountain said to
+be steep, and the forests which clothed them impassable, but there
+were mysterious dangers to be encountered. Men who had gone with me
+anywhere else I had asked them, had affairs of their own to attend
+to when I spoke of climbing Apo, or else flatly refused to go.
+
+I was told that no man that started up the mountain had ever come
+back. Enormous pythons drew their green bodies over its sides. Man-apes
+lived in its upper forests whose strength no human being could
+meet. Devils and goblins lurked in the crevasses below the summit,
+and above all and most terrible of all, there was a spirit of the
+mountain whose face to see was death.
+
+My questions as to how they knew all these things if no man had lived
+to come back from the mountain had no effect. This was not a case
+for logic; it was one of those where instinct ruled.
+
+There is a queer little animal, something like a sable, which is
+peculiar to Mindanao. The natives call it "gato del monte," which
+means "mountain cat." I wanted to get some specimens of this animal
+and also of a variety of pigeon which they call "the stabbed dove,"
+because it has a tuft of bright red feathers like a splash of blood
+upon its otherwise snow-white breast.
+
+To get these I settled myself in a native village a few miles inland
+from the town of Dinagao, on the west shore of the Gulf of Davao. Mount
+Apo towered just above this place, and I meant to climb its sides
+before I left the valley.
+
+After the Bagabos in whose village I was living found that all their
+tales of the terrible dangers on Apo did not dissuade me from tempting
+them, three of the men agreed to pilot me as far up the mountain
+side as they ever went, and to carry there for me a sufficient supply
+of food to last me, as they evidently believed, as long as I should
+need food. One of them, the best guide and carrier I had found on the
+whole island, had screwed his courage up to where he had promised
+to go farther with me; but the morning of our start a "quago" bird
+flew across our path and hooted; and that settled the matter. Such
+an ominous portent as that no intelligent Bagabo could be expected
+to disregard. The men hardly could be got to carry my luggage as
+far as they had agreed, and as soon as they had put the things down,
+they bade me a hasty farewell and scuttled down the mountain as fast
+as their legs could carry them.
+
+I slept that night where the men had left me, and set out early the
+next morning, hoping to get to the top of the mountain and back to
+the same place before night overtook me. The climb was more than hard
+for the first mile--harder than I had even feared. The forest grew
+so dense as to be practically impassable, and I finally took to the
+bed of a rocky stream, up which the travelling, although dangerous,
+was not so hard.
+
+In time, though, by scrambling up this water course, I passed
+beyond the tree line, and then, where there was only shrubbery,
+it was fairly easy to get along. I could see above the vegetation,
+now, and the view even from here would have repaid me for all my
+effort. The side of the mountain swept down in a majestic curve from
+my feet to the sea. At its base was Dinagao, and farther up the coast,
+Davao. Beyond them lay the blue waters of the Gulf of Davao, and far
+across this, showing only as a line of deeper blue upon the water,
+the mountain ranges of the eastern peninsula.
+
+The bushes through which I waded were bent down with the ripe berries
+which grew on them. A herd of small, dark brown deer feeding among
+the bushes hardly moved out of my way. I wondered at their tameness,
+but thought it must be because no man had ever come within their
+sight before.
+
+Above the bushes there was a zone of rock, broken in places into huge
+boulders, and then between this and the cone was the sulphur field,
+glowing, now that I was near enough to see it, with a richness of
+colouring such as no painter's palette could reproduce. From darkest
+green to deepest blue, through all the tints and shades of yellow,
+the colour scheme went, with here and there a touch of rose.
+
+I had stopped a moment to get breath and to gaze at the wonderful
+scene before me when there came into it and stood still between two
+great rocks, as a living picture might have stepped up into its frame,
+a woman, the strangest to look at that I have ever seen.
+
+She was young and slender. She was dressed in a simple, dark-brown,
+hemp-cloth garment which fell from neck to feet, and her round young
+arms were bare to the shoulder.
+
+It took me a full minute, before I could realize what it was which
+made her look so strange to me.
+
+Then I knew. It had been so long since I had seen a white woman that
+I did not know one when I saw her.
+
+This woman's face and arms were as white as mine--much whiter, indeed,
+for I was tanned by months of Asiatic sun--and the hair which fell
+about her shoulders and down below her waist, was white;--not light,
+or golden, but white.
+
+For once in my life, I am willing to confess, my nerves went back on
+me; and I could think of nothing but what the natives in the village
+at the foot of the mountain had told me. Pythons and man-apes and
+devils I had seen no trace of, but here, beyond question, was the
+"Spirit of the Mountain."
+
+A stout, pointed staff of iron-wood, which I had been carrying to
+help me in my scramble up the mountain, slipped from my hand and fell
+clattering to the rocks. The woman turned her head toward the spot from
+which the sound had come, as if she heard the noise of the stick upon
+the stones, but although we were only a little way from each other,
+there was no expression in her face to indicate that she saw me.
+
+Then she spoke.
+
+"Madre!"
+
+There was no answer, and she called again, clearer and louder.
+
+"Ma-dre!"
+
+There was a sound of swift steps on the stones, and a moment later
+another woman--an older woman--came from behind one of the rocks.
+
+As if in answer to some question in the girl's face, the woman looked
+down and saw me.
+
+In an instant she had sprung before the younger woman, as if to hide
+her from me.
+
+There are some women in the world whose very manner carries with
+it an impression of power. Such was the woman whom I saw before me
+now. Not young; dark of skin, clad only in the simplest possible
+hemp-cloth garment, there was in her face a dignity which could not
+but win instant recognition.
+
+"Who are you?" she asked in Spanish. "And why do you come here?"
+
+I told her as simply and as plainly as I could, who I was, and why
+I had come up the mountain. She kept her place in front of the girl,
+screening her from sight during all the time that we were talking.
+
+When I had finished she stood silent for a moment, as if thinking
+what to do.
+
+"Since you have come here," she said at last, "where I had thought no
+one would ever come, and have learned what I had hoped no one would
+ever know, you will not, I feel sure, deny me an opportunity to tell
+you enough of the reason why two women live in this wild place, so
+that I hope you will help them to keep their secret. May I ask you
+to go with us to the place which we call home?"
+
+I said I would be glad to go, without having the slightest idea
+where we were going. I should have said it just the same, I think,
+if I had known she was going to lead me straight down into the crater
+of the volcano.
+
+"Elena," the older woman said, speaking to the girl. Then she said
+something else, in a native dialect which I did not understand.
+
+The girl came out from the place where she had been hidden, and
+passed behind the rocks. When I saw her face, now, I saw what I had
+not perceived before. She was blind.
+
+When the girl had been gone a little time the woman said: "Will you
+follow me?"
+
+She waited until I had climbed up to where she stood, and then led
+the way around the rock behind which the girl had disappeared. A well
+defined path led from that place down into the dwarfed vegetation,
+and then, through that to the forest beyond. The girl was already some
+distance down this path, walking rather slowly, as blind people walk,
+but steadily, and with fingers outstretched here and there to touch
+the bushes on each side.
+
+We followed. Where the trees began to be tall enough to furnish
+shelter, my guide stopped, pushed aside the branches of what
+appeared to be an impenetrable thicket, and motioned me to follow
+her through. The girl had disappeared again. The opening through
+which we went was so thoroughly hidden that I might have gone past
+it fifty times and never suspected it was there, or thought that the
+path down which we had come was anything but a deer track.
+
+Another short path led us to a cleared space in the forest in which a
+long, low house of bamboo and thatch had been built. A herd of deer
+was feeding near the house. Those directly in our path moved lazily
+out of the way. The others did not stir. I knew then why the deer
+that I had seen as I had come up the mountain were so tame.
+
+A broad porch was built against one side of the house, and under
+this were hung fibre hammocks. The woman pointed me to one of these
+hammocks, and leaving me there went into the house. When she came
+back she brought two gourds filled with some kind of home-made wine,
+and two wooden cups. The girl, coming just behind her, brought a
+basket of fruit which the woman took from her and placed upon a bamboo
+stand beside my hammock. Then, filling one of the cups from a gourd,
+she drank half its contents and set the cup down, fixing her eyes on
+mine as she did so.
+
+I knew enough of native customs by this time to understand what
+this meant. If I took the cup which she had drunk from, and drank,
+I was a guest of the house, and bound in honor to do it no harm. If
+I poured wine from the other gourd into another cup and drank, I was
+under obligations as a guest only while I was under the roof.
+
+I took the cup from the table and drank the half portion of wine
+which she had left in it.
+
+"Thank you," the woman said. "I will trust you."
+
+Then, sitting on a bamboo stool near my hammock, she began to
+talk. Only, at times, as she told me her story, she would rise and
+walk up and down the porch, as if she could tell some things easier
+walking than when sitting still.
+
+Much of what she told me I shall not write down here; but enough for
+an understanding of the strange things which followed.
+
+"My home was once in ----," she said, naming one of the most important
+towns in the island. "My father was a Spanish officer, rich, proud
+and powerful. My mother was a Visayan woman. When I was little more
+than a girl, my parents married me to a Spanish officer much older
+than myself. So far as I knew then what love was, I thought I loved
+him. Afterward, I came to know.
+
+"Among the prisoners brought into my husband's care there came one
+day a Moro, whose life, for some reason, had been spared longer than
+was the lot of most prisoners. I told myself, the first time I saw
+this man, that he was the noblest looking man I had ever seen, and
+since that time I have never seen his equal. Chance made it possible
+for us to meet and speak, and then, in a little while, I came to know
+what love really is.
+
+"One day I learned that the Moro prisoner was to be beheaded the
+next day. Word had come that a Spanish prisoner whom the Moros had
+captured some time before, and with the hope of whose ransom this
+man had been held, had been killed.
+
+"That night"--the woman was walking the floor of the porch now--"I
+killed my husband while he was asleep, set the man I loved free, and
+we fled the city. By day we hid in the forests, and walked by night,
+until we came to a part of the island where the Moros lived. Nicomedis
+brought me to the town which had been his home, and we were married
+and lived there.
+
+"Elena is our child. You have seen her."
+
+I realized cow the truth about the girl;--her strange appearance,
+the color of her skin and eyes and hair. In my travels through the
+islands I had once or twice seen other albino children.
+
+The woman had sat down again.
+
+"Our life in the Moro town was never wholly comfortable. My husband's
+people distrusted me. I was of a different faith, and from a hostile
+race. They would rather he would have chosen a wife of his own
+people. When the child was born things grew worse. Some said the tribe
+would never win in war while the child lived;--it was a curse. Then
+came a year when the plague raged among the Moros as it had never been
+known to do, terrible as some of its visits before that time had been.
+
+"One day a slave, whose life Nicomedis once had saved when his
+master would have beaten the man to death, came to our house and
+told us that the people of the town were coming to kill us all,
+that the curse might be removed and the plague stayed. My husband
+would have stood up to fight them all until he himself was killed,
+but for the sake of the child, and because I begged him not to leave
+us alone, he did not. Again we fled into the forest; and because the
+trees and the beasts and the birds were kinder to us than any men,
+we said we would come up here--where we knew no man dare come--and
+would live our lives here.
+
+"Eight years ago my husband died." The woman was walking the porch
+again, and sometimes she waited a long time between the sentences of
+her story. "We buried him out there," pointing to where the forest came
+up to one side of the enclosure. "It is easy for us to live here. We
+have everything we need. We have never been disturbed before. Only
+once, years ago, did any of the natives come as far up the mountain
+as this, and it was easy for us to frighten them so that no one has
+dared to come since then. You are the only living person who knows
+our secret. Shall we know that it is to be safe with you?"
+
+For answer I filled the wooden cup from the gourd again, drank half
+the contents, and handed the cup to her to drink the rest.
+
+"I thank you," she said. "My life has had enough of sin and suffering
+in it so that I have hoped it may not have more of either.
+
+"I would not have you think that I am complaining," she said hastily,
+a moment later, as if she was afraid I would get that impression. "I
+am not. I do not regret one day of my life. My hands are stained with
+what people call crime, and my heart knows all the weight which grief
+can lay upon a heart; but the joy of my life while my husband lived
+paid for it all. To have been loved by him as I was loved, was well
+worth crime and grief."
+
+"Why do you not go away from here?" I asked. "Why not leave this
+country entirely, and go to some new land where you would be free
+from danger? I will help you to get away."
+
+"We know nothing of other lands," she said. "We should be helpless
+there. We are better here." "Besides," a moment later, "his grave,"
+pointing out toward the trees, "is here."
+
+It had grown dark as we talked; the thick, dead darkness of a
+Philippine forest night. The deer on the ground outside the porch
+had lain down and curled their heads around beside them and gone
+to sleep. Enormous bats flew past the house. We could not see them,
+but we felt the air which their huge wings set in motion. The woman
+lighted a little torch of "viao" nuts. Elena came out of the house,
+walked across the porch and disappeared in the darkness, going toward
+the forest.
+
+"Ought she to go?" I asked. "Will she not be lost, or hurt?"
+
+"Did you not understand it all?" the girl's mother said. "She is
+blind only in the day time. At night she sees as readily as you and
+I do by day."
+
+In a few minutes the girl came back with her hands filled with fresh
+picked fruit. She gave me this, and her mother brought out from the
+house such simple food as she could provide.
+
+"You will sleep here, tonight," she said, and left me.
+
+The next day I went to the top of the mountain, and after that, by
+making two trips to my camp, brought up all the articles which had
+been left there, including some blankets a gun and ammunition, some
+food and some medicines. These I asked "the woman of the mountain,"
+as I called her to myself, to let me give to her. She took them, and
+thanked me. I stayed there that night, and the next day said good by
+to the two strange women, and went down the mountain.
+
+When I reached my house in the village I found my neighbors getting
+ready to divide my property among themselves, since they were satisfied
+I would never return to claim it. They did not think it strange that I
+came back empty-handed. That I had come back at all was a wonder. For
+the sake of the security of the two women I let it be known that I had
+seen strange sights on the volcano's top, and that it was a perilous
+journey to climb its sides.
+
+I planned to stay in the village some weeks longer. My house, like
+most of the native habitations, was built of bamboo, and was set upon
+posts several feet above the ground. I lived alone. One night about
+a month after my return, I woke from a sound sleep, choking.
+
+Some one's hand was pressed tightly over my mouth, and another hand
+on my breast held me down motionless upon my sleeping mat.
+
+"Don't speak!" some one whispered into
+my ear. "Don't make a sound! Lie perfectly
+quiet until you understand all that I am
+saying!
+
+"The natives have banded themselves together to kill you tonight. They
+believe the village has been cursed ever since you came down from
+Mount Apo, and that you are the cause of it."
+
+I could see now that there had been a growing coldness toward me on
+the part of the people ever since I had come back. And there had
+been evil luck, too. The chief's best horse had cast himself and
+had to be killed. Two men out hunting had fallen into the hands of
+a hostile tribe and been "boloed." Game had been unusually scarce,
+and a "quago" bird had hooted three nights in succession.
+
+"They are coming here tonight to burn your house," the same voice
+whispered, "and kill you with their spears if you try to escape the
+flames. No matter how I knew, or how we came. There is no time to
+lose. You cannot stop to bring anything with you. Come outside the
+house at once, as noiselessly as possible, and Elena will lead us to
+where you can escape."
+
+The hands were taken from my mouth and body, and I felt that I
+was alone.
+
+A few moments later, outside the house, when I stepped from the ladder
+to the ground, a hand--a woman's hand--grasped mine firmly.
+
+"Do not be afraid to follow," the same voice whispered. "Elena will
+lead the way, and will tell us of anything in the path."
+
+The hand gave a tug at mine, and I followed. We were in absolute
+darkness. Sometimes the frond of a giant fern brushed against my
+cheek, or the sharp-pointed leaf of a palm stung my face, but that
+was all. The girl led us steadily onward through the forest.
+
+"Stop!" she said, once, "and look back."
+
+I turned my face in the direction from which we had come. A ray of
+light shone in the darkness, and quickly became a blaze. It was my
+house on fire. With the light of the fire came the sound of savage
+cries, the shouts of the men watching with poised spears about the
+burning house. In the dim light which the fire cast where we stood,
+I could make out the forms of my two companions. A black cloth bound
+around the girl's head hid her white hair. In the dark, her eyes,
+so blank in the day light, glowed like two stars. She held her mother
+by the hand, and the older woman's other hand grasped mine. I looked
+at the girl, and thought of Nydia, leading the fugitives from out
+Pompeii to safety.
+
+Before the light of the fire had died, we were on our way again. It
+seemed to me as if we walked in the darkness of the forest for hours;
+but after a little we were following a beaten track. At times the
+girl told us to step over a tree fallen across the path, or warned
+us that we were to cross a stream. At last we came out on the hard
+sand of the ocean beach, and reached the water's edge. Freed from
+the forest's shade the darkness was less dense. I could make out the
+surface of the water, and out on it a little way some dark object. The
+girl spoke to her mother in their native tongue.
+
+"There is a 'banca,'" the woman said, pointing out over the water to
+the boat. "No matter whose it is. Swim out to it, pull up the anchor,
+and before day comes you can be safe."
+
+I tried to thank her.
+
+"I am glad we could do it," she said, simply. "I am glad if we could
+do good."
+
+Then they left me; and went back up the beach into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+WITH WHAT MEASURE YE METE
+
+
+"The story of the tax collector of Siargao reminds me of an official
+of that rank whom I once knew," said a fellow naturalist whom I
+once met at a club in Manila, and with whom I had been exchanging
+experiences. "It was when I was gathering specimens in Negros. They
+were a bad lot, those collectors, a set of money-grabbers of the
+worst kind, but, bad as they were, they had a hard time, too.
+
+"If they did not make their pile, out of the poor natives, and go
+back to Manila or to Spain, rich, in three or four years, it was
+pretty likely to be because they had fallen victims to the hate of
+the natives or to the distrust of the officials at headquarters.
+
+"When I first went to Negros, and had occasion to go to the tribunal,
+as the government house was called, I noticed some objects in one of
+the rooms so odd and so different from anything I had seen anywhere
+else that I asked their use. I was told that they were used for
+catching men who had not paid their taxes.
+
+"Among the various thorn-bearing plants which the swamps of the
+Philippine Islands produce is one called the 'bejuco,' or 'jungle
+rope.' This is a vine of no great size, but of tremendous strength,
+which, near the end, divides into several slender but very tough
+branches. Each of these branches is surrounded by many rings of long,
+wicked, recurved thorns, as sharp and strong as steel fish-hooks, and
+nearly as difficult to dislodge. The hunter who encounters a thicket
+of 'bejuco' goes around it, or turns back, for it is hopeless to try
+to go through. While he frees himself from the grasp of one thorn,
+a dozen more have caught him somewhere else.
+
+"The objects which I had seen in the tribunal guard room were made
+of long bamboo poles, across one end of which two short pieces had
+been fastened. To these cross pieces were bound a great number of the
+'bejuco' vines, so arranged that the innumerable hooks which they
+bore could be easily swung about in the air.
+
+"The 'Gobernadorcillo' who was in office at the time was a man who
+had no mercy on his people. Negros, with the other islands of the
+group commonly known as Visayan, forms a province which is under the
+supervision of a governor who has his headquarters in the island of
+Cebu, where also the bishop who is the head of the see resides.
+
+"Negros is near enough to Cebu so that the authority of the government
+could be maintained better there than it could in the more distant
+islands. When I was there the village of Dumaguete, the chief town
+and seaport of Negros, contained a stone fort, the most imposing
+probably of any outside the capital; while the garrison formed of
+half-breed soldiers who were on duty there, sent down from Cebu with
+the 'Gobernadorcillo,' kept the people in a degree of subjection
+which in many places would have been impossible.
+
+"The men whom the Governor employed to round up his delinquent subjects
+were called 'cuadrilleros.' Sunday was the day he devoted to the sport,
+for such I think he really regarded it. The 'cuadrilleros' would start
+out in the morning with a list of the men who were wanted. A house
+would be surrounded, and unless the man had been given some warning
+of their coming, and had fled, he would be driven out. Then, if he
+tried to escape, or refused to come with them, one of the 'bejuco'
+'man-catchers' was swung with a practiced hand in his direction,
+and, caught in a hundred places by its cruel, thorny hooks, he was
+led to town, the journey in itself being a torture such as few men
+would think they could endure. The whipping came later.
+
+"It was not until Pedro fell into trouble that I came to know really
+the worst of all this. Of course I knew in a way, I had seen the
+'bejuco' poles, and the rattans, and the whipping bench, and sometimes,
+of a Sunday, when I was in the village and could not go away, I had
+heard cries from the tribunal such as white men do not often hear--such
+as I hope no one will ever hear again, even from those places.
+
+"Pedro was my Visayan servant, a good worker and a likable fellow in
+every way. He came to me one Sunday morning in great distress. His
+twin brother had been dragged into the tribunal that morning by the
+'cuadrilleros,' and was at that very moment being flogged. Could I
+not help him? Would I not go to the Governor and tell him that Pedro
+would pay his brother's tribute as soon as he could earn the money?
+
+"If course I would. I would gladly do more than that I would pay the
+money myself and let Pedro earn it afterwards. The man's last wages,
+I knew, had gone to pay his old father's taxes and his own. His family
+lived some little distance inland.
+
+"We lost no time in getting to the tribunal. Pedro told me on the
+way, and I think he told me the truth, that his brother's tax was
+not rightly due then, else he would have been ready with the money.
+
+"I have always been glad I had Pedro wait outside the door of the
+government house.
+
+"His brother was bound upon the whipping bench, his body bare to the
+waist. A row of stripes which ran diagonally across his bare back from
+hip to shoulder showed where each blow of the rattan had cut through
+skin and flesh so that the blood flowed back to mark its course.
+
+"'Stop!' I cried, rushing forward to where the Governor was
+standing. 'Stop! I will pay this man's tax. How much is it? Let him
+up! I'll pay for him.'
+
+"The Governor looked at me a moment, and, excited as I was, I noticed
+that his face was set in an angry scowl.
+
+"'You can't pay for him, now,' he said. 'No one can pay for him now.'
+
+"'I'll teach them,' he added, a moment later, 'See that!' holding up
+his left arm, about the wrist of which I saw a handkerchief was bound,
+fresh stained with blood.
+
+"'Go on!' he cried, to the man with the rod.
+
+"At first I could not find out what had happened. Then a soldier
+told me.
+
+"The man had been brought in like a snared animal, held by the jungle
+ropes, each thorn of which was agony. When he had cried out that he
+was unjustly tortured, the Governor himself had dragged the clinging
+hooks from out his flesh, and had called him a name which to the
+Visayan means deathly insult if it be not resented.
+
+"At which Pedro's brother, snatching a knife which was hidden inside
+his clothing, struck at the Governor and wounded him in the arm,
+before he could be caught by the soldiers, disarmed, and bound down
+on the bench.
+
+"And all the time I had been learning this, the blows of the flog-man
+had been falling, laid on with an artistic cruelty across the other
+welts.
+
+"I could not bear it. At the risk of destroying my chances to be
+allowed to finish my work in the island, perhaps even at the risk of
+putting my own life in danger, I tried once more.
+
+"'Unless you stop,' I cried, 'I will report you to your government.'
+
+"The 'Gobernadorcillo' looked at me a moment, and almost smiled--a
+smile which showed his teeth at the sides of his mouth.
+
+"'Please yourself.' he said. 'But unless you like what I am doing I
+would suggest that you step out.'
+
+"The man died that night, in the prison beneath the tribunal.
+
+"I kept my word, and wrote a full account of the whole affair to the
+Governor-general at Manila. It was weeks before I received a curt
+note in reply, saying that the general government made it a rule not
+to interfere with the local jurisdiction of its subordinates.
+
+"Pedro never spoke to me of his brother's death but once. There was
+in his nature much of the same grim courage which had enabled his
+brother to bear the awful pain of that day upon the whipping bench
+without a cry.
+
+"'Senor,' Pedro said one day, quite suddenly, 'I would not have
+you think me a coward, that I do not avenge my brother's death. I
+would have killed the Governor at once, or now, or any day, openly,
+glad to have him know how and why, and glad to die for the deed,
+only that now there is no one but me left to care for my old father,
+It is not that I am a coward, but that I wait.'
+
+"I expect that I should have felt myself in duty bound to expostulate
+with him, upon harbouring such a state of mind as that, regardless
+of what my own private opinion in the matter may have been, had it
+not been that before I could decide just what I wanted to say, a man
+had come to my house to tell me that the mail steamer from Manila,
+which came to the island only once in two months was come in sight.
+
+"The coming of that particular steamer was of special interest to me,
+as it was to bring me a stock of supplies; and Pedro and I went down
+to the dock at once.
+
+"I remember that invoice in particular, because it brought me a
+supply of chloroform, a drug, which I had been out of, and for which
+I was anxiously waiting. Two months before, a native from far back
+in the forest had brought me a fine live ape. I could not keep him
+alive,--that is not after I left the island,--and I wanted his skin
+and skeleton for the museum, but I hated to mar the beauty of the
+specimen by a wound. That night with Pedro's help I put him quietly
+out of the way, with the help of the chloroform.
+
+"Afterwards the thought came back to me that as we took away the
+cone and cotton, when I was sure the animal was dead, Pedro said,
+'Senor, how like a man he looks.'
+
+"Several weeks later the residents of Dumaguete were thrown into
+intense if subdued excitement by the news that the Gobernadorcillo
+was dead. Apparently well as usual the night before, he had been
+found dead in hie bed in the morning, in the room in the 'gobierno'
+in which he slept. If he had been killed on the street, or found
+stabbed, or shot, in his room, the commotion would not have been so
+great. Such things as that had happened in Negros more than once,
+to other officials. But this man was simply dead.
+
+"The 'teniente primero,' who, as next in authority, took charge of
+affairs upon the death of his superior, sent a man during the day
+to ask me if I would come to the tribunal. He was a very decent man,
+or would have been, I think, under a different executive. Naturally
+he was anxious, under the circumstances, as to his own standing with
+the authorities at Cebu, and he asked for my evidence, if necessary,
+as that of one of the few foreigners in the place.
+
+"In company with him I visited the late governor's room in the
+'gobierno.' It was a large room, like all of those in the palace,
+as the executive mansion was sometimes called, built upon the ground
+floor, and having several lattice windows. A soldier was on duty in
+the room. As we were coming out, this man came to us, and saluting the
+'teniente,' handed him a small tin can, saying, 'A servant cleaning
+the room, found this.'
+
+"The 'teniente' looked at the can curiously, and then, handing it to
+me, asked me if I knew what it was.
+
+"'It is a can in which a kind of strong liquor sometimes comes,'
+I said. Then I unscrewed the top. The can was empty, but I showed
+him that there was still a strong and pungent odor which lingered in
+it. The explanation satisfied him. The late governor had been known
+to be a man who had more than a passing liking for strong liquors.
+
+"I did not feel called upon to explain that the can was a chloroform
+can, and that no one in the place but myself had any like it.
+
+"When I went home, though, and counted my stock, I found, as I had
+expected, that it was one can short; and that the cone and cotton which
+I had used for giving the drug had been replaced by one freshly made.
+
+"I did not think it necessary, either, to impart the result of my
+investigations to the authorities, or to suggest to them any suspicions
+which might have been roused in my own mind.
+
+"Even if there had not been very decided personal reasons why I would
+better not, unless I was obliged to, I had in mind that letter of
+a few months before, when these same authorities had informed me of
+their policy of non-interference in local affairs.
+
+"Moreover, I could not but remember what I had seen that day, when
+the man now dead had said to me, 'I'll teach them.' If his teachings
+had been effectual, had I any reason to criticise?"
+
+
+
+
+
+TOLD AT THE CLUB
+
+
+"Speaking of 'anting-anting,'" said a man at the club House on the
+bank of the Pasig river, in Manila, one evening, "I have had an
+experience in that line myself which was rather striking."
+
+An American officer at the club that evening had just been telling
+us about a native prisoner captured by his command sometime before
+in one of the smaller islands, who, when searched, had been found to
+be wearing next his skin a sort of undershirt on which was roughly
+painted a crude map of certain of the islands of the archipelago.
+
+This shirt, it seemed, the officer went on to explain, the man regarded
+as a powerful "anting-anting," which would be able to protect him
+from injury in any of the islands represented on it. That he had been
+taken alive, instead of having been killed in the fight in which he
+was captured, the man firmly believed to be due to the fact that he
+was wearing the shirt at the time. A native servant in the employ of
+one of the officers of the company had explained later that such an
+"anting-anting" as this was highly prized, and that it increased in
+value with its age. Only certain "wise men" had the right to add a
+new island to the number of those painted on the garment, and before
+this could be done the wearer of the shirt must have performed some
+great deed of valour in that particular island. The magic garment was
+worn only in time of war, or when danger was known to threaten, and
+was bequeathed from father to son, or, sometimes, changed ownership
+in a less peaceful way.
+
+"What was the experience which you have referred to?" I finally asked
+the man who had spoken, when he did not seem inclined to go on of
+his own accord.
+
+The man hesitated a moment before he replied to my question, and
+something in his manner then, or perhaps when he did speak, made me
+feel as if he was sorry that he had spoken at all.
+
+"It is a story I do not like to tell," he said, and then added hastily
+a little later, as if in explanation, "I mean I do not like to tell
+it because I cannot help feeling, when I do tell it, that people do
+not believe me to be telling the truth.
+
+"Some years ago," he continued, "I went down to the island of Mindoro
+to hunt 'timarau,' one of the few large wild animals of the islands--a
+queer beast, half way between a wild hog and a buffalo.
+
+"I hired as a guide and tracker, a wiry old Mangyan native who seemed
+to have an instinct for finding a 'timarau' trail and following it
+where my less skillful eyes could see nothing but undisturbed forest,
+and who also seemed to have absolutely no fear, a thing which was even
+more remarkable than his skill, since the natives as a general thing
+are notably timid about getting in the way of an angry 'timarau.' As
+a matter of fact I did not blame them so very much for this, after I
+had had one experience myself in trying to dodge the wild charge of one
+of these animals infuriated by a bullet which I had sent into his body.
+
+"Perico, though,--that was the old man's name,--never seemed to have
+the least fear.
+
+"I was surprised, then, one morning when the weather and forest
+were both in prime condition for a Hunt, to have my guide flatly
+refuse to leave our camp. Nothing which I could say or do had the
+least influence upon him. I reasoned, and threatened, and coaxed,
+and swore, but all to no effect.
+
+"When I asked him why he would not go,--what was the matter,--was he
+ill? he did not seem to be inclined to answer at first, except to say
+that he was not ill; but finally, later in the day, he explained to
+me that he had had a 'warning' that it would not be safe for him to
+go hunting that day; that his life would be in danger if he did go.
+
+"Perico had been about the islands much more than most of the men
+of his tribe. He had even been to Manila once or twice, and so not
+only knew much more about the world than most Mangyans did, but
+had also picked up enough of the Spanish language so that he could
+speak it fairly well. In this way he was able to tell me, finally,
+how the 'warning' had come to him, and why he put so much confidence
+in it. He also told me this was why he had been so brave about the
+hunting before. He knew that he was not in any danger so long as he
+was not forewarned. When he had been warned he avoided the danger by
+staying quietly in camp, or in some place of safety.
+
+"Even after he had told me as much as this, Perico would not explain
+to me just how the 'warning' had come, until, at last, he said that
+'the stone' had told him.
+
+"This stone, he said, was a wonderful 'anting-anting' which had
+been in his family for many years. His father had given it to him,
+and his grandfather had given it to his father.
+
+"Once, many, many years before, there had been an ancestor of his
+who had been famous through all the tribe for his goodness and
+wisdom. This man, when very old, had one day taken shelter under
+a tree from a furious storm. While he was there fire from the sky
+had come down upon the tree, and when the storm was over the man was
+found dead. Grasped tightly in one of the dead man's hands was found
+a small flat stone, smooth cut and polished, which no one of his
+family had ever seen him have before. Naturally the stone was looked
+upon as a precious 'anting-anting,' sent down from the sky, and was
+religiously watched until its mysterious properties were understood,
+and it was learned that it had the power to forewarn its owner against
+impending evil. When danger threatened its owner, Perico said, the
+stone glowed at night with a strange light which he believed was due
+to its celestial origin. At all other times it was a plain dull stone.
+
+"The night before, for the first time in months, the stone had flashed
+forth its strange light; and as a result its owner would do nothing
+which would place him in any danger which he could avoid.
+
+"I thought of all the strange stories I had read and heard of meteors
+falling from the sky, and of phosphoric rocks, and of little known
+chemical elements which were mysteriously sensitive to certain
+atmospheric conditions, and wondered if Perico's stone could be any
+of these. All my requests to be allowed to see the wonderful stone,
+however, proved fruitless, Perico was obdurate. There was a tradition
+that it must not be looked at by daylight, he said, and that the eyes
+of no one but its owner should gaze upon it.
+
+"And so, for eight beautiful days of magnificent hunting weather,
+that aggravating heathen stone kept us idle there in the midst of the
+Mindoro forest. I could not go alone, and Perico simply would not go
+so long as the stone glowed at night, as, he informed me each morning,
+it had done. It was in vain that I fretted, and offered him twice,
+and four times, and, finally--with a desire to see how much in earnest
+the man really was--ten times his regular wages if he would go with me
+for just one hunt. He simply would not stir out of the camp, until,
+on the morning of the ninth day, he met me with a cheerful face,
+and said, 'Senor, we will hunt today. The stone is black once more.'
+
+"And hunt we did,--that day, and many more--for the stone remained
+accommodatingly dark after that--and we had good luck, too.
+
+"When I came back to Manila I brought Perico with me. He had begun
+to have serious trouble with one of his eyes, which threatened to
+render him unable to follow the work of hunting of which he was so
+fond. I tried to make him believe that this was the danger of which
+he claimed he had been warned by the stone, but he would not agree to
+this, saying that his 'anting-anting' always foretold only a violent
+death, or some serious bodily injury. In Manila I had him see that Jose
+Rizal who afterwards became so prominent in the political troubles of
+the islands, and who had such a tragic later history. Senor Rizal,
+who had studied in Europe, was a skillful oculist, and an operation
+which he performed on Perico's eye was entirely successful. I kept
+the old man with me until he was fully recovered, and then sent him
+back to his native island. Before he went, he thanked me over and
+over again for what I had done, and kept telling me that some time
+he would pay me for it all.
+
+"I laughed at him, at first, not thinking what he meant, until, just
+before he was to go to the boat, he clasped my hand in both his,
+and said, 'Senor, I have no children to leave the "anting anting"
+of my family to. When I die, it shall be yours.'
+
+"I would have laughed again, then, had it not been that the poor old
+fellow was so much in earnest that it would have been cruel. As it
+was, I thanked him, and told him I hoped he would live many years to
+be the guardian of the stone, and to be guarded by it himself.
+
+"After Perico had gone, I forgot all about him. Imagine my surprise,
+then, when a little more than a year afterward, I received a small
+packet from a man whom I knew in Calupan, the seaport of Mindoro,
+and a letter, telling me that my old guide was dead, and that during
+the illness which had preceded his death he had arranged to have the
+packet which came with the letter sent to me.
+
+"The package and letter reached me one morning. Of course I knew what
+Perico had sent me, and, foolish as it may seem, a bit of tenderness
+for the old man's genuine faith in his talisman made me, mindful of
+his admonition that the stone must not be exposed to the light of day,
+restrain my curiosity to open the package until I was in my rooms
+that night. What I found, when at last I held the mysterious charm
+in my hands, was a smooth, dark, flint-like disc, about an inch and
+a half in diameter, and perhaps half an inch in thickness.
+
+"Whatever the stone might have done for its former owners, or might
+do for me at some other time, it certainly had no errand to perform
+that night. It was just a plain, dark stone, and no matter how long
+I looked at it, or in what position, it did not change its appearance.
+
+"Finally, half provoked with myself at my thoughts, I put the stone
+into a little cabinet in which were other curious souvenirs of my
+travels in the islands, and forgot it.
+
+"Two years after that it became necessary for me to go to Europe. I
+had taken passage on one of the regular steamers from Manila to Hong
+Kong, and was to reship from there. As I expected to return in a few
+months, I did not give up my lodgings, but before I started I packed
+away much of my stuff for safe keeping. As I was busy at the office
+during the day, I did the most of this packing in the evenings. In
+the course of this work I came to the little cabinet of which I have
+spoken, and threw it open in order to stuff it with cotton, so that
+the contents would not rattle about when moved."
+
+The man who was telling the story stopped at this point so long that
+we who sat there in the smoking room of the Club listening to him
+were afraid he was not going to continue. At last he said:--
+
+"This is the part of the story which I do not like to tell.
+
+"On the black velvet lining of the cabinet, surrounded by the jumble
+of curios among which it had been tossed, lay old Perico's stone,--not
+the plain, dark stone which I had put there, but a faintly glowing
+circle of lustrous light.
+
+"I shut the lid of the cabinet down, locked the box, and put the key in
+my pocket. But I did no more packing that night. I came down here to
+the Club, and stayed as long as I could get anybody to stay with me,
+and talked of everything under the sun except the one thing which I
+was all the time thinking about.
+
+"The next day I told myself I was a fool, and crazy into the bargain,
+and that my eyes had deceived me. And then, in spite of all this,
+when I went home at night I could hardly wait for dusk to come that
+I might open the cabinet.
+
+"The stone lay on the velvet, just as the night before, as if it were
+a thing on fire!
+
+"I said to myself that I would have some common sense, and would
+exercise my will power; and went on with my packing with furious
+energy. But I did not put the cabinet where I could not get at it.
+
+"The boat for Hong Kong on which I had taken passage was to sail the
+next night. I finished my work, said good bye to my acquaintances,
+and went on board. Fifteen minutes before the steamer sailed I had my
+luggage tumbled from her deck back on to the wharf, and came ashore,
+swearing at myself for a fool, and knowing that I would be well
+laughed at and quizzed for my fickleness by every one who knew me."
+
+The man stopped again. After a little, one of the men who had been
+listening to him said, in a voice which sounded strangely softened:--
+
+"I remember. That was the ----," calling the name of a steamer
+which brought to us all the recollection of one of the most awful
+sea tragedies of those terrible tropic waters, where sometimes sea
+and wind seem to be in league to buffet and destroy.
+
+"Yes," said the man who had told the story. "No person who sailed on
+board of her that night was ever seen again; and only bits of wreckage
+on one of the northern reefs gave any hint of her fate."
+
+
+
+
+
+PEARLS OF SULU
+
+
+Now and then people comment upon the odd style of a charm which I
+wear upon my watch chain. The charm is a plain, gold sphere, and is,
+I acknowledge, a trifle too large to be in good taste.
+
+If those who ask me about the charm are people whom I care to trust,
+I sometimes open the globe--it has a secret spring--and show them
+hidden away inside, a single pearl, so large and perfect that no one
+who has ever seen it has failed to marvel at its beauty. If they ask
+me why I wear so regal a gem, and where I got it, I tell them that I
+am not quite sure that the jewel is mine, and that if I ever find the
+person who seems to have a better right to it than I, I shall give it
+up. Meanwhile I like to wear the locket where I can sometimes look at
+the pearl, since it is a reminder of what I think was the strangest
+adventure I ever had in the Philippine Islands. And I had many queer
+experiences there during the years I have journeyed up and down the
+archipelago in one capacity and another.
+
+One summer when I was collecting specimens for a great European museum,
+I was living on the southeastern shore of the island of Palawan. Or
+rather I was living above, or beside the shore of the island; I don't
+know which word would best describe the location of my house, which,
+however, one could hardly say was on the island.
+
+The Moros who live on that side of the island which is washed by the
+Sulu Sea, and who ostensibly depend upon pearl fishing for a living,
+and really lived by their high-handed deeds of piracy against their
+neighbors and mankind in general, inhabit odd houses which are built
+on stout posts driven into the sand at the edge of the sea. The
+walls of the houses are woven of bamboo, and the roofs are thatched,
+like those of nearly all the native habitations, but the location is
+unique. When the tide is high, the surface of the water--fortunately
+the village is built over a sheltered bay--comes to within two feet
+beneath the floors of the houses, and the inhabitants go ashore in
+cockle-shell boats. When the tide is low the foundation posts rise
+out of the mud and sand, and the people go inland on foot, dodging
+piles of seaweed and similar debris, left by the receding waves.
+
+It was one of these houses that I hired, and in it set up my household
+belongings while I was at work in that part of Palawan.
+
+The location had many advantages, for at that time I was principally
+engaged in collecting corals, sponges, shell fish and similar
+salt-water specimens. The natives brought me boat loads of such
+material, for once in their lives, at least, working for honest
+wages. I sorted over the stuff they brought, on a platform built
+out in front of my house, and disposed of the mass of refuse in the
+easiest way imaginable, merely by shoving it off the edge of the
+platform into the water, where the tide washed it out to sea.
+
+Then, too, this keeping house over the water brought a blessed
+relief from the invasion of one's home by snakes, rats, ants and
+all the vermin of that kind which makes Philippine housekeeping on
+the land a burden to the flesh, while I did not foresee at first
+that the very water which protected me from these dangers might make
+possible the secret incursions of larger creatures. The disadvantage
+of this semi-marine style of architecture, as I looked at it, was that
+some night a big tidal wave might come along, chasing a frolicsome
+earthquake, and bearing my house and myself along with it, leave us
+hanging high and dry in the tops of some clump of palm trees half a
+dozen miles inland.
+
+So far as the Moros were concerned, I got along all right with
+them. They knew, in the first place, that I had the authority of the
+Spanish government to do about what I chose in Palawan, and although
+they cared not one ripple of the Sulu Sea for the authority of Spain
+when it could not be enforced by force of arms, they did respect my
+arsenal of weapons and the skill with which I one day shot down a
+crazy "tulisane" of their tribe who had started to run amuck, and
+by the shot saved the lives of no one knew how many of them. This,
+and my doctoring back to health two of their number who were ill,
+made us very good friends, and I could not have asked for more willing
+helpers, or more able, especially Poljensio.
+
+It was not for many weeks after I had left Palawan for good, that I
+came to understand that Poljensio may have had a double reason for
+his willingness, which at the time I little suspected.
+
+I remember very well the first time I saw the fellow. It was the
+day of the "macasla" festival. Up to that time I had found no Moro
+who would work steadily as my helper. Whatever men I hired, although
+satisfactory while they worked, would eventually have something else
+to do, either pearl fishing, or hunting, or long trips seaward in
+their proas, they said for fishing, but I thought, and found later I
+had thought rightly, for robbery. Even Poljensio used to claim time,
+now and then, when he said the conditions of the water and weather
+were favorable for finding pearl oysters, to go and dive for those
+lottery-ticket-like bivalves.
+
+To tell the truth I did not blame the men so very much for turning
+pirates, after I came really to understand the conditions connected
+with the pearl fisheries.
+
+The pearl oysters live at the bottom of such deep water, and are so
+hard to get, that I have often seen a man come up from his search for
+them with blood running from his ears and nose, the result of staying
+down so long. Of course such things as divers' suits, and air pumps,
+were unknown there. The men stripped their slim, brown bodies naked,
+and went over the side of the boat with no apparatus except their
+two hands and a sharp knife to use against the sharks. Sometimes the
+men never came back, and then we knew the knife had not been quick
+enough. Poljensio had a row of scars on one leg, where a shark had
+bitten him, years before, which made the leg look as if it had been
+between the bars of a giant's broiling iron.
+
+Then, after the forces of nature had been overcome, as if they alone
+were not bad enough, the representatives of the government, the
+"Gobernadorcillo," had to be reckoned with; and he was worse than
+all the rest.
+
+The pearl fisheries of Palawan were the property of the Sultan
+of Sulu. At least up to that time that monarch had been able to
+maintain an ownership in them which allowed him to claim all of the
+pearls above a certain size. All that the divers got for their risk
+and labor were the small pearls and the shells. Fortunately for them
+most of the shells had a market value for cutting into cameos, and for
+inlay work, and the Chinese dealers who came to Palawan bought them,
+as well as the pearls.
+
+It was the business of the "Gobernadorcillo" to watch the divers, and
+take from them all the pearls large enough to become the perquisite
+of the Sultan. The men were allowed to go out to the water over the
+oyster beds only on certain days, and then the Sultan's representative
+went with them, and sat in his boat to keep watch that no shells were
+opened there. After the boats had returned to the land every oyster
+shell was opened under his watchful eye, and every large pearl was
+claimed. Of course it was only rarely that an oyster held a pearl,
+more rarely still that the gem was a large one. When they did find a
+big one it always made me feel sorry to see the poor fellow, who had
+worked so hard for it, have to give the prize up to go, no doubt,
+to deck some one of the four hundred wives of the ruler who lived
+across the Sulu Sea.
+
+Poljensio was one of the best of the divers. It was at the "macasla"
+festival, as I have said, that I first noticed him. For a month the
+natives had talked about "macasla," and this, with what I had heard
+about it before, made me anxious to see the performance. So far as I
+knew I was the first American who had ever had the opportunity. It is
+only rarely that the festival can be kept, because its success depends
+upon the possession by the natives of the berries of a certain shrub,
+which must be in just such a stage of ripeness to have the requisite
+power. The plant on which the berries grow is not at all common. In
+this case it was necessary to send a long way into a distant part of
+the island to get the berries.
+
+The "macasla" festival is really a great fishing expedition, in which
+every man, woman and child who lives near the village where it is held
+takes part. The berries are the essential element in a great mass,
+composed of various ingredients mixed together; just the same as a
+bit of yeast put into a pan of bread leavens the whole lot. One very
+old man was said to be the only person near there who understood
+just how to make the mixture. A large log which had been hollowed
+out and used at one time for a canoe, was utilized as a trough to
+make the mixture in. The mass was mixed up in the afternoon and left
+to ferment overnight. When he had it ready the old man covered the
+canoe with banana leaves and forbade any one to go near it until the
+next morning. I saw several different kinds of vegetable substances
+crushed up, to be put into the canoe, besides the berries; and at
+last a quantity of wood ashes were added.
+
+The next morning every one was out early, as it was necessary to begin
+operations when the tide was at its very lowest point. Every one about
+the village was on hand, each person bringing a loosely woven wicker
+basket, into which was put a small quantity of the mixture from the
+old log canoe. When all had been provided with this they walked out
+as far as they could go, to where the tide was just turning. Then,
+waiting until the incoming water had passed them on its way inland,
+the natives, formed in a long line parallel with the shore, dropped
+their baskets into the water and shook them to and fro until all of
+the "macasla" had been washed out through the loose wicker work.
+
+In about ten minutes the effect of the mixture began to be seen. The
+smaller fish were affected first, and began to come to the top of
+the water, as if for air. Very soon they were followed by the larger
+ones, and soon the water seemed filled with them. They would come
+to the top of the water, turn on one side, flop about a little as
+if intoxicated, and then sink helplessly to the bottom, where, the
+water being nowhere very deep, it was easy to see them and capture
+them. The natives secured basket after basket full, getting some so
+large that they could not carry them in their baskets. These they
+would disable with a "machete" and then tow ashore. The fish did not
+eat the "macasla." It seemed simply to have impregnated the water,
+making a solution too powerful for them to withstand. They were not
+killed by its effects, but acted as if they were drunk. Those which
+the natives did not capture soon recovered and swam away as briskly as
+ever. Before they were able to do this though, the natives had secured
+more than enough food to last them as long as it would remain eatable.
+
+Of course I found the miscellaneous harvest of sea animals which the
+"macasla" brought in most interesting, and secured a good many valuable
+specimens. Inasmuch as I had contributed very materially to the feast
+which was to take place that night, and which lasted all night long,
+the people let me wade about among the strangely helpless creatures
+and have a first pick of such as I wanted. I had noticed Poljensio
+running about, as one of the strongest and most agile of all the men
+in the water, and when he came near me once, when my basket was heavy,
+I offered to hire him to help me, although I had little idea that
+any one would work for wages at such a time. Quite to my surprise he
+seemed willing, and joined me in what I was doing. I learned afterwards
+that having no family to provide for he was not so much in need of
+profiting by the fish harvest as most of the men were. He had worked
+in the water all his life, and knew more about the habits of some of
+the creatures we caught than I did. When we came to go to my house,
+and he saw the specimens I had preserved there, he seemed to take a
+more intelligent interest in them than any other man I had ever had,
+and I was glad to be able to hire him to work for me all of the time,
+barring the few days he reserved for pearl fishing.
+
+The season which followed proved to be an unusually successful one
+for the divers. The crop of oysters was large, and many pearls were
+found. The gems which were to go to the Sultan were superb, and there
+would be enough of them to make a truly royal necklace.
+
+One night about six months after the "macasla" festival I woke suddenly
+from a sound sleep, with that strange feeling which sometimes comes to
+one at night, that I was not alone. While I lay listening and peering
+into the darkness of the room in which I slept, I heard a soft splash
+in the water beneath me, such as a big fish might have made if he had
+come to the surface, and diving back had struck the water with his
+tail. It had been high tide soon after midnight, and the water was
+not more than three or four feet beneath me. I listened a long time,
+but could hear nothing more, and finally went to sleep again, deciding
+that the splash I had heard had been made by a shark, and that some
+noise which he had made before that had been what had roused me.
+
+Any further thought of my disturbance which I might have had was
+driven from my mind in the morning, when I came out and found the
+community in a state of violent commotion.
+
+The "gobierno," the house in which the "Gobernadorcillo" lived, had
+been robbed in the night, and a bag containing about half the Sultan's
+pearls was gone. The government official, along with several other
+residents, lived on shore. The houses which, like mine, were built over
+the water, were generally inhabited by the divers and their families.
+
+The voice of the "Gobernadorcillo" was not the only one raised in
+lamentation that morning, by any means, for he had very promptly
+begun a search for the missing jewels by beating his servants and
+every one connected with the official residence, within an inch of
+their lives. When this did not produce the pearls he extended the
+process to such other unfortunate residents of the town as fell
+under his suspicion. I really think the only thing which kept him
+from killing a few of the wretches was the fear that he might by some
+chance include the thief in the number, and thus destroy all hope of
+getting back the stolen gems.
+
+No man, woman or child was allowed to leave the village, and so
+thorough was the system by which one of those deputy tax collectors
+kept track of his people, that he knew every one by name, and knew just
+where each one should be found. His superiors required a certain sum
+of money from each tax collector. They did not care in the smallest
+degree where or how he got the money, but a certain amount he must
+turn in at stated times, or else be put in prison and have other
+unpleasant things done to him. So it stood the "Gobernadorcillo"
+in good stead to know who his people were, and where they were,
+and how much each person could be made to pay.
+
+As soon as his arm was rested from the beating he had given the
+suspected natives the official began a personal search of each house
+in the village. The native houses are so simple, and their stock
+of furniture so small, that it was no great task to make a thorough
+inspection of the entire place. What little furniture each house had
+was outside of it when the examination of that house was completed. It
+was fortunate for the people who lived in the houses built over the
+water that their homes were visited at low tide, for in the state
+of the examiner's temper when he visited them I think their effects
+would have gone out into the sea just as quickly as they went out on
+to the sand.
+
+Even my house came under the terms of the universal edict, although
+my things were not used so harshly as were those of the natives,
+which was fortunate for me, for I had hundreds of specimens packed,
+and many more ready to pack, which I should have been very sorry
+indeed to have had dumped out of doors.
+
+My relations with the Governor had always been pleasant. He really was
+quite as good a man as any one in his place could be expected to be. We
+had gotten along very well together, and I was glad now that this was
+so. When he came to my house he contented himself with looking through
+the part of the building where the native servant who cooked for me
+worked and lived. Poljensio slept at home, and spent only the daytime
+at my house. The search of that part of the establishment over, the
+worried official sat down in my work room to rest for a few minutes,
+cool himself off, and bewail the fate which had brought him such ill
+luck. Poljensio, who was washing sponges on the platform outside,
+and had for this reason not been at his brother's house, where he
+slept, when that domicile was searched, was called in, and while
+his official master rested, was made to strip himself stark naked,
+and turn his few slight garments--the clothing of a Moro is always an
+uncertain quantity--inside out to show that nothing was hidden therein.
+
+Knowing the place so well as I did, and the means at the command of the
+"Gobernadorcillo," I could not for the life of me see how any one who
+had stolen the pearls could keep them, or hide them, for that matter,
+unless they had been thrown back into the sea again.
+
+So far as the governor himself was concerned he would not suffer from
+the loss. The yearly crop of pearls was not like the money tax, a
+stated sum, nor could the Sultan enforce his claims as did the Spanish
+government. His title to the fisheries was too slight for it to be
+policy for him to make trouble. Besides that, Sulu was so far away that
+its ruler might never hear that this year's crop had been larger than
+usual. Not all the gems had been taken. The governor could turn over
+what had been left him, and it was not at all likely that any questions
+would be asked. In fact, if it had not been for his evident concern,
+which I did not believe him clever enough to have simulated, I would
+almost have believed he had stolen the pearls himself. He certainly
+was indefatigable in his attempts to find the missing property. Not
+a native left the village for any purpose that his clothing and his
+boat, if he was going out upon the water, were not inspected.
+
+My own stay in Palawan was nearly ended at the time, and it was
+not long after that before I had completed my collections, packed
+my specimens, and was ready to go. Poljensio had agreed to go with
+me as far as Manila, to handle my freight and baggage, and to help
+me there about repacking and shipping my specimens. On my going to
+Europe he was to return to Palawan.
+
+When I was ready to go, and had my luggage in shape to be sent on
+board the sail boat which was to take me to a port visited by the
+monthly steamer to Manila, I wondered if the "Gobernadorcillo" would
+let me go. He proved very obliging, however, shook hands, and hoped
+I would have a pleasant voyage. Poljensio, though, had to submit to
+the usual ordeal of having his clothing searched. Luggage he had none,
+so he was not troubled in that respect.
+
+I had planned to stop in Hong Kong a month on my way to Europe. On
+the morning of the day that I was to leave there I was surprised to
+receive a package by one of the local English expresses of the city,
+and more surprised to find that the package contained a small box of
+specimens which had been missing when I had repacked my property at
+Manila. The specimens in this box were particularly choice ones, and
+their loss had been as annoying as it had been unaccountable. The
+pleasure which I felt in getting them back, though, was nothing
+compared to my amazement when I found along with the package another
+small one containing a letter from Poljensio.
+
+The letter, if I had chosen to put it among my specimens, would
+have ranked, I am sure, among the greatest curiosities of the whole
+collection. Poljensio was not a scholar. His accomplishments lay
+in the line of diving and swimming; in gathering pearls, and such
+things as that. He never would have wasted his time in struggling
+with pen and paper, now, if the nature of the correspondence had
+not been such that he could not safely entrust it to any one else;
+and the full comprehension of the remarkable document, written in the
+mingled native and Spanish languages, with which he had favored me,
+was not vouchsafed to me at the first reading, or the second.
+
+Translated, and made as nearly coherent as possible, it ran about
+like this:
+
+"I stole the pearls. I only took half, so not too much" (scrimmage,
+fuss, row, trouble,--the native word he used meant no one of these
+exactly, and yet included them all) "would be made. I was tired of
+working so hard, and the sharks, and not getting anything for it but
+shells. I made up my mind I would do it soon after I went to work for
+you. I went diving after that only that I be not suspected. I knew
+all of us native people would be searched, but I thought he would
+pass you by. So that night, after I had got the pearls, I swam out to
+your house, climbed up through the floor, and hid the bag in a place
+where I would know. Then, one day, when I packed a fine big shell,
+I hid the bag in it, and marked the box. When we got to Manila I
+stole the box. I sorrow to make you this bad time, but have no other
+way. I take good care of box, though, after I take pearls out, to
+bring it here with me, and now I send it back. I sell all the pearls
+here but one, to China merchant, for money enough to make me always a
+rich man. I don't think I go back to Palawan. One pearl I save back,
+and send you with this letter, to remember by it Poljensio."
+
+That was what was in the package with the letter. The pearl he had
+saved; this one which I wear.
+
+As I said in the first place, I am ready give it up when I can find
+a man who has a better claim to it than I have. My right of ownership
+in the gem is not, I confess, very substantial; but whose is it?
+
+It was not the "Gobernadorcillo's," for he was only an agent; and
+besides that he left Palawan not long after I did, as I have found
+out by inquiry, and I cannot learn where he now is.
+
+The Sultan of Sulu who reigned then is dead, and if the gem belonged
+to him it did not belong to his successor; for the friends of the
+first ruler declared that the man who gained the throne after him was
+a false claimant. Should I send it to the dead man's heirs? He had
+no son, and one can hardly divide one pearl among four hundred widows.
+
+Only Poljensio is left, and his claim, even if I could find him,
+I fear would be counted hardly legal. Quite likely he would not take
+it back, even if I found him; and sometimes, when I reflect upon what
+would probably have happened to me if the bag of stolen pearls had
+been found by any chance in my house, I am not sure that I should
+feel like offering the gem to him.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+            A Great American Novel of the Civil War.
+                      THE GRAPES OF WRATH.
+                   A Tale of North and South.
+                    BY MARY HARRIOTT NORRIS,
+        Author of _The Gray House of the Quarries_, etc.
+
+12mo, doth, decorative, with six full-page illustrations by
+H. T. Carpenter.                                                $1.50
+
+A really great American novel of the Civil War, which will appeal
+with equal force to-day to the Southern as well as to the Northern
+reader. The title is, of course, suggested by Mrs. Howe's line,--
+
+    "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath
+    are stored."
+
+The story is developed from the fortunes, amid the vicissitudes of war,
+of an old New Jersey family, one son of which had settled in Virginia,
+becoming a general in Lee's army. There is little fighting and no cheap
+heroics in the book, but it gives a clearer picture and a more intimate
+and impressive understanding of what the great struggle really meant
+to Unionist and to Confederate alike than many a military history.
+
+
+
+              A Romance of the Iowa Wheat Fields.
+                     THE ROAD TO RIDGEBY'S.
+                  BY FRANK BURLINGAME HARRIS.
+
+12mo, cloth, decorative.                                        $1.50
+
+A simple but powerful story of farm life in the great West, which
+cannot fail to make a lasting impression on every reader. In this
+book Mr. Harris has done for the wheat fields what Mr. Westcott has
+done for rural New York and Mr. Bacheller for the North country. It
+is in no way imitative of _David Harum_ or _Eben Holden_; and, unlike
+each of these books, it is not in the portrayal of a single quaint
+character that its power consists. Mr. Harris has taken for his story
+a typical Iowa farmer's family and their neighbours; and, although
+every one of the characters is realistically portrayed, the sense of
+proportion is never lost sight of, and the result is a picture of real
+life, artistic in the highest sense, as being true to nature. It is
+a wholesome story, full of the real heroism of homely life, a book
+to make the reader better by strengthening his belief in the truth
+of self-sacrifice and the survival of sturdy American character.
+
+
+
+         A Remarkable Study of Social Life in America.
+                          DIFFERENCES
+                        BY HERVEY WHITE.
+
+12mo, cloth, decorative, 320 pages.                             $1.50
+
+"It is treating the poor as a class and employing any method of
+handling them that I object to.... Why can't they be treated as
+individuals, the same as other people? What would the rich think of
+my impertinence if I went about the world treating them in a peculiar
+manner,--as if they were not real people, at all, but only 'the rich,'
+in my knowledge? "--Hester Carr, in _Differences_.
+
+    "_Difference_ is an extraordinary book.... The labor question
+    is its primary concern, and the caste barrier which modern
+    conditions have erected between the man who works and the man
+    who merely lives. This is no new theme, yet _Differences_ is
+    new, and its place in thoughtful literature awaits it. The
+    only argument presented by Mr. White is contained in the
+    picture he spreads before us. It is real, and set out with
+    bold, firm strokes, and there is no attempt to be merely
+    artistic. Genevieve Radcliffe, the rich society girl,
+    who goes to work charity with the poor, and John Wade,
+    the workman, whose situation involves all the tragedy of
+    metropolitan poverty, are human, if they be not typical. They
+    embody the 'differences', and, if they do not point the way
+    to equality, it is because American civilization is not yet
+    ripe for them. Withal, the book is not a tract. It is worth a
+    thousand such. Informed throughout with a tender simplicity,
+    a sense of the beauty of common things, and a sincerity that
+    brooks no question, it carries equal appeal to the student of
+    economics and to the lover of human feeling."--_Philadelphia
+    North American._
+
+    "There is no end of philosophy in books about the poor
+    and how to reach them and send rays of sunshine into their
+    world; but few books get at the real 'Differences' that exist
+    between the wealthy classes and the poor as does Mr. Hervey
+    White.... _Difference_ is vitally interesting, both as a
+    story and as a moral lesson.... It is written with wholesome
+    enthusiasm and an intelligent survey of real facts."--_Boston
+    Herald._
+
+    "The method employed by Mr. Hervey White in _Differences_
+    is not like that of any author I have ever read in the
+    English language. It resembles strongly the work of the
+    best Russian novelists, it seems to me, and particularly
+    that of Dostolevsky, and yet it is in no sense an imitation
+    of those writers: it is apparently like them merely because
+    the author's motives and ways of thought and observation are
+    like them.... I have never before read any such treatment
+    in the English language of the life and thought of laboring
+    people."--Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, in _Boston Transcript_.
+
+
+
+
+          A Powerful Realistic Novel of American Life.
+                           QUICKSAND
+                        By HERVEY WHITE.
+
+12mo, cloth, decorative, 328 pages.                             $1.50
+
+
+_Quicksand_ is a strong argument against a certain condition which
+the author believes exists too generally in American society, and
+is, in effect, an appeal for the freedom of the individual in family
+life. It is a powerful tragedy, developing very naturally out of the
+effects of the interference of parents in the lives of their children,
+and of brothers and sisters in the affairs of each other. It becomes
+therefore, not only the story of an individual, but the life history of
+an entire family, the members of which are portrayed with astonishing
+vividness and realism. The hero of the book also illustrates, in
+his sufferings and failures, the unfortunate effects of a too narrow
+orthodoxy in religion, coupled with his family's interference with his
+growth out of this environment. Offsetting the tragedy of the story is
+"Hiram," the "hired man" of the family in its earlier New England days,
+in whom, particularly, the reader's interest will centre. Patient,
+kindly, faithful, and uncomplaining, he is indeed the real "hero"
+of the tale, the only one free from the unfortunate environments of
+the other characters, yet forced indirectly to suffer also because of
+them. It is the every-day life of the every-day family that is drawn;
+and this fact, together with the boldness and fidelity of the drawing,
+gives the story its power and impressiveness.
+
+    "Hervey White is the most forceful writer who has appeared
+    in America for a long generation."--_Chicago Evening Post_.
+
+    "We cannot remember another book in which lives, thoughts,
+    emotions, souls, and principles of action have been analyzed
+    with such convincing power. Mr. Hervey White has great
+    literary skill. He has here made his mark, and he has come to
+    stay.... He is the American George Gissing, and as such some
+    day he will have to be taken into account."--_Boston Herald_.
+
+    "It should insure Mr. White a permanent place in the critical
+    regard of his fellow-countrymen.... Few characters as strong
+    as that of Elizabeth Hinckley have ever been drawn by an
+    American author, and she will remain in the mind of the most
+    assiduous novel reader, secure of a place far above that held
+    by most of the puny creations of the day."--_Chicago Tribune_.
+
+    "It is wrought of enduring qualities. Few novels are so
+    sustained on an elevated plane of interest."--_Philadelphia
+    Item_.
+
+    "It is a novel that takes hold of one, and is not the sort
+    of book that, once begun, can be laid down without being
+    finished."--_Indianapolis News_.
+
+
+
+
+               Two Notable Novels by Emma Rayner.
+                        VISITING THE SIN
+       A Tale of Mountain Life In Kentucky and Tennessee.
+
+12mo, cloth, with cover designed by T. W. Ball. 448 pages.      $1.50
+
+The struggle between the heroine's love and her determination to visit
+the sin upon the son of the supposed murderer of her father forms the
+basis of the story. All of the characters are vividly drawn, and the
+action of the story is wonderfully dramatic and lifelike. The period
+is about 1875.
+
+    "A powerful, well-sustained story, the interest in which does
+    not flag from the first chapter to the last."--_Philadelphia
+    North American._
+
+    "Unusually powerful. The dramatic plot is intricate, but not
+    obscure."--_The Congregationalist._
+
+    "A graphic and readable piece of fiction, which will
+    stand with the best of its time concerning humble American
+    characters."--_Providence Journal._
+
+    "Far ahead of most of these latter-day Southern
+    novels."--_Southern Star._
+
+    "The people in the story are persistently real."--_Christian
+    Advocate._
+
+
+
+
+                         FREE TO SERVE
+                  A Tale of Colonial New York.
+
+12mo, cloth, with a cover designed by Maxfield Parrish. 434 pages.
+                                                                $1.50
+
+
+    "One of the very best stories of the Colonial period yet
+    written,"--_Philadelphia Bulletin._
+
+    "We have here a thorough-going romance of American life in the
+    first days of the eighteenth century. It is a story written
+    for the story's sake, and right well written, too. Indians,
+    Dutch, Frenchmen, Puritans, all play a part. The scenes are
+    vivid, the incidents novel and many."--_The Independent._
+
+    "The writing is cleverly done, and the old-fashioned atmosphere
+    of old Knickerbocker days is reproduced with such a touch
+    of verity as to seem an actual chronicle recorded by one who
+    lived in those days."--_Saturday Evening Post_, Philadelphia.
+
+    "The supreme test of a long book is the reading of it, and
+    when one reaches the end of _Free to Serve_, he acknowledges
+    freely that it is the best book that he has taken up for a
+    long time,"--_Boston Herald._
+
+
+
+
+                  An Irish Love Story of 1848.
+                            MONONIA.
+                   BY JUSTIN McCARTHY, M.P.,
+
+Author of _A History of Our Own Times_, _Dear Lady Disdain_, etc. 12mo,
+green cloth and gold.                                               $1.50
+
+
+Mr. McCarthy has written several successful novels; but none, perhaps,
+will have greater interest for his American readers than this volume,
+in which he writes reminiscently of the Ireland of his youth and
+the stirring events which marked that period. It is pre-eminently
+an old-fashioned novel, befitting the times which it describes,
+and written with the delicate touch of sentiment characteristic of
+Mr. McCarthy's fiction. The book takes its name from the heroine,
+a charming type of the gentle-born Irish-woman. In the development of
+the romance, the attempts for Ireland's freedom, and the dire failures
+that culminated at Ballingary, are told in a manner which give an
+intimate insight into the history of the _Young Ireland_ movement. If
+the book cannot be considered autobiographical, the reader will not
+forget that the author was contemporary with the events described, and
+will have little difficulty in perceiving that many of the principal
+characters are strongly suggestive of the Irish leaders of that day,
+which gives the book scarcely less value than an avowed autobiography.
+
+    "Mononia is drawn with all Mr. McCarthy's ancient
+    skill." _London Outlook_.
+
+    "Beautiful in every sense is this 'Mononia.' It is a work
+    that we could expect from no other author, for it is largely
+    reminiscent. So, besides its attractiveness as a romance, the
+    book is attractive as an informal historical document. Read in
+    either of these lights, it will be found delightful."--_Boston
+    Journal_.
+
+    "Altogether a good story.... Mononia is full of beauty,
+    tenderness, and that sweet and wholesome common sense which
+    is so refreshing when found in a woman."--_The Pilot_ (Boston).
+
+    "The description of the affection of Mononia and Philip is
+    a piece of literary splendor."--_Boston Courier_.
+
+    "For those who would reject its historical and autobiographic
+    phase, there remains the old-fashioned love romance, full
+    of fine Irish spirit, which is always refreshing."--_Mail
+    and Express_.
+
+
+
+
+                 TUSKEGEE: ITS STORY & ITS WORK
+                     By MAX BENNETT THRASHER
+
+_With an Introduction by_ BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 12mo, cloth, decorative,
+248 pages, 50 Illustrations,                                        $1.00
+
+THE TUSKEGEE NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE, at Tuskegee, Alabama, is
+one of the most uniquely interesting institutions in America. Begun,
+twenty years ago, in two abandoned, tumble-down houses, with thirty
+untaught Negro men and women for its first students, it has become
+one of the famous schools of the country, with more than a thousand
+students each year. Students and teachers are all of the Negro
+race. The Principal of the school, Mr. Booker T. Washington, is the
+best-known man of his race in the world to-day.
+
+In "Tuskegee: Its Story and its Work," the story of the school is
+told in a very interesting way. He has shown how Mr. Washington's
+early life was a preparation for his work. He has given a history of
+the Institute from its foundation, explained the practical methods
+by which it gives industrial training, and then he has gone on to
+show some of the results which the institution has accomplished. The
+human element is carried through the whole so thoroughly that one
+reads the book for entertainment as well as for instruction.
+
+    _COMMENTS_.
+
+    "All who are interested in the proper solution of the problem
+    in the South should feel deeply grateful to Mr. Thrasher
+    for the task which he has undertaken and performed so
+    well."--Booker T. Washington.
+
+    "Should be carefully and thoughtfully read by every friend of
+    the colored race in the North as well as in the South,"--_New
+    York Times_.
+
+    "The book is of the utmost value to all those who
+    desire and hope for the development of the Negro race in
+    America."--_Louisville Courier-Journal_.
+
+    "Almost every question one could raise in regard to the
+    school and its work, from Who was Booker Washington? to What
+    do people whose opinion is worth having think of Tuskegee? is
+    answered in this book."--_New Bedford Standard_.
+
+
+
+
+For sale at all Bookstores, or sent, postpaid, on receipt of price,
+by the publishers,
+
+                Small Maynard & Company, Boston.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Anting-Anting Stories, by Sargent Kayme
+
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