the plough, in the colonies carry out great undertakings.  Without any technical education, and without any scientific knowledge, they build churches and bridges, and construct roads. [Poor architects.] The circumstances therefore are greatly in favor of the development of priestly ability; but it would probably be better for the buildings if they were erected by more experienced men, for the bridges are remarkably prone to fall in, the churches look like sheep-pens, and the roads soon go to rack and ruin.  I had much intercourse in Camarines and Albay with the priests, and conceived a great liking for them all.  As a rule, they are the most unpretending of men; and a visit gives them so much pleasure that they do all in their power to make their guest’s stay as agreeable as possible.  Life in a large convent has much resemblance to that of a lord of the manor in Eastern Europe.  Nothing can be more unconstrained, more unconventional.  A visitor lives as independently as in an hotel, and many of the visitors behave themselves as if it were one.  I have seen a subaltern official arrive, summon the head servant, move into a room, order his meal, and then inquire casually whether the padre, who was an utter stranger to him, was at home.

The priests of the Philippines have often been reproached with gross immorality.  They are said to keep their convents full of bevies of pretty girls, and to lead somewhat the same sort of life as the Grand Turk.  This may be true of the native padres; but I myself never saw, in any of the households of the numerous Spanish priests I visited, anything that could possibly cause the least breath of scandal.  Their servants were exclusively men, though perhaps I may have noticed here and there an old woman or two.  Ribadeneyra says:—­“The natives, who observe how careful the Franciscan monks are of their chastity, have arrived at the conclusion that they are not really men, and that, though the devil had often attempted to lead these holy men astray, using the charms of some pretty Indian girl as a bait, yet, to the confusion of both damsel and devil, the monks had always come scathless out of the struggle.”  Ribadeneyra, however, is a very unreliable author; and, if his physiological mistakes are as gross as his geographical ones (he says somewhere that Luzon is another name for the island of Cebu!), the monks are not perhaps as fireproof as he supposes.  At any rate, his description does not universally apply nowadays.  The younger priests pass their existence like the lords of the soil of old; the young girls consider it an honor to be allowed to associate with them; and the padres in their turn find many convenient opportunities.  They have no jealous wives to pry into their secrets, and their position as confessors and spiritual advisers affords them plenty of pretexts for being alone with the women.  The confessional, in particular, must be a perilous rock-a-head for most of them.  In an appendix to the “Tagal Grammar” (which, by-the-bye, is not added to the editions sold for general use) a list of questions is given for the convenience of young priests not yet conversant with the Tagal language.  These questions are to be asked in the confessional, and several pages of them relate exclusively to the relations between the sexes.