aversion to the duties and labors of village life.  Every Filipino has an innate inclination to abandon the hamlets and retire into the solitude of the woods, or live isolated in the midst of his own fields; and it is only the village prisons and the priests—­the salaries of the latter are proportionate to the number of their parishioners—­that prevent him from gradually turning the pueblos into visitas, [97] and the latter into ranchos.  Until a visit to other ranchos in the neighborhood corrected my first impression, I took the inhabitants of the slopes of the Iriga for cross-breeds between the low-landers and negritos.  The color of their skin was not black, but a dark brown, scarcely any darker than that of Filipinos who have been much exposed to the sun; and only a few of them had woolly hair.  The negritos whom I saw at Angat and Mariveles knew nothing whatever about agriculture, lived in the open air, and supported themselves upon the spontaneous products of nature; but the half-savages of the Iriga dwell in decent huts, and cultivate several vegetables and a little sugar-cane.  No pure negritos, as far as I could ascertain, are to be met with in Camarines.  A thickly-populated province, only sparsely dotted with lofty hills, would be ill-suited for the residence of a nomadic hunting race ignorant of agriculture.

[Iriga settlements.] The ranchos on the Iriga are very accessible, and their inhabitants carry on a friendly intercourse with the lowlanders; indeed, if they didn’t, they would have been long ago exterminated.  In spite of these neighborly communications, however, they have preserved many of their own primitive manners and customs.  The men go about naked with the exception of a cloth about the loins; and the women are equally unclad, some of them perhaps wearing an apron reaching from the hip to the knee. [98] In the larger ranchos the women were decently clad in the usual Filipino fashion.  Their household belongings consisted of a few articles made of bamboo, a few calabashes of coconut-shell, and an earthen cooking-pot, and bows and arrows. [Poison arrows.] These latter are made very carefully, the shaft from reeds, the point from a sharp-cut bamboo, or from a palm-tree, with one to three sharp points.  In pig-hunting iron-pointed poison arrows are used. [Crucifixes.] Although the Igorots are not Christians, they decorate their huts with crucifixes, which they use as talismans.  If they were of no virtue, an old man remarked to me, the Spaniards would not employ them so numerously. [99] The largest rancho I visited was nominally under the charge of a captain, who, however, had little real power.  At my desire he called to some naked boys idly squatting about on the trees, who required considerable persuasion before they obeyed his summons; but a few small presents—­brazen earrings and combs for the women, and cigars for the men—­soon put me on capital terms with them.