[Petaca cigar cases.] Baliwag is also especially famous for its petaca [60]cigar-cases, which surpass all others in delicacy of workmanship.  They are not made of straw, but of fine strips of Spanish cane, and particularly from the lower ends of the leaf-stalks of the calamusart, which is said to grow only in the province of Nueva Ecija.

[Preparation of material.] A bundle of a hundred selected stalks, a couple of feet long, costs about six reals.  When these stalks have been split lengthways into four or five pieces, the inner wood is removed, till nothing but the outer part remains.  The thin strips thus obtained are drawn by the hand between a convex block and a knife fixed in a sloping position, and between a couple of steel blades which nearly meet.

[Costly weaving.] It is a task requiring much patience and practice.  In the first operation, as a rule, quite one-half of the stems are broken, and in the second more than half, so that scarcely twenty per cent of the stalks survive the final process.  In very fine matting the proportionate loss is still greater.  The plaiting is done on wooden cylinders.  A case of average workmanship, which costs two dollars on the spot, can be manufactured in six days’ uninterrupted labor.  Cigar-cases of exceptionally intricate workmanship, made to order for a connoisseur, frequently cost upwards of fifty dollars.

[Volcanic stone quarries.] Following the Quingua from Baliwag up its stream, we passed several quarries, where we saw the thickly-packed strata of volcanic stone which is used as a building material.  The banks of the river are thickly studded with prickly bamboos from ten to twelve feet high.  The water overflows in the rainy season, and floods the plain for a great distance.  Hence the many shells of large freshwater mussels which are to be seen lying on the earth which covers the volcanic deposit.  The country begins to get hilly in the neighborhood of Tobog, a small place with no church of its own, and dependent for its services upon the priest of the next parish.  The gentle slopes of the hills are, as in Java, cut into terraces and used for the cultivation of rice.  Except at Lucban I have never observed similar sawas anywhere else in the Philippines.  Several small sugar-fields, which, however, the people do not as yet understand how to manage properly, show that the rudiments of agricultural prosperity are already in existence.  The roads are partly covered with awnings, beneath which benches are placed affording repose to the weary traveller.  I never saw these out of this province.  One might fancy oneself in one of the most fertile and thickly-populated districts of Java.