[Picking fish.] At Calumpit I saw some Chinese catching fish in a peculiar fashion.  Across the lower end of the bed of a brook which was nearly dried up, and in which there were only a few rivulets left running, they had fastened a hurdle of bamboo, and thrown up a shallow dam behind it.  The water which collected was thrown over the dam with a long-handled winnowing shovel.  The shovel was tied to a bamboo frame work ten feet high, the elasticity of which made the work much easier.  As soon as the pool was emptied, the fisherman was easily able to pick out of the mud a quantity of small fish (Ophiocephalus vagus).  These fishes, which are provided with peculiar organisms to facilitate respiration, at any rate, enabling them to remain for some considerable time on dry land, are in the wet season so numerous in the ditches, ponds, and rice-fields, that they can be killed with a stick.  When the water sinks they also retire, or, according to Professor Semper, bore deeply into the ooze at the bottom of the watercourses, where, protected by a hard crust of earth from the persecutions of mankind, they sleep away the winter.  This Chinese method of fishing seems well adapted to the habits of the fish.  The circumstances that the dam is only constructed at the lower end of the watercourse, and that it is there that the fish are to be met with in the greatest numbers, seem to indicate that they can travel in the ooze, and that as the brooks and ditches get dried up, they seek the larger water channels.

[To Baliwag.] Following the Quingua in its upward and eastward course as it meandered through a well-cultivated and luxuriantly fertile country, past stone-built churches and chapels which grouped themselves with the surrounding palm-trees and bamboo-bushes into sylvan vignettes, Father Llano’s four-horsed carriage brought me to the important town of Baliwag, the industry of which is celebrated beyond the limits of the province.

[Board houses and their furniture.] I visited several families and received a friendly reception from all of them.  The houses were built of boards and were placed upon piles elevated five feet above the ground.  Each consisted of a spacious dwelling apartment which opened on one side into the kitchen, and on the other on to an open space, the azotea; a lofty roof of palm-trees spread itself above the dwelling, the entrance to which was through the azotea.  The latter was half covered by the roof I have just mentioned.  The floor was composed of slats an inch in width, laid half that distance apart.  Chairs, tables, benches, a cupboard, a few small ornaments, a mirror, and some lithographs in frames, composed the furniture of the interior.  The cleanliness of the house and the arrangement of its contents testified to the existence of order and prosperity.

[Tapis weaving.] I found the women in almost all the houses occupied in weaving tapis, which have a great reputation in the Manila market.  They are narrow, thickly-woven silk scarves, six varas in length, with oblique white stripes on a dark-brown ground.  They are worn above the sarong.