The conquest of the Philippines by the Spaniards has not been complete as a military achievement or the enforcement of the adoption of customs and costumes according to the habits and taste of the conquerors, who have nibbled at the edges of the vast archipelago, greater in its length and breadth and its natural riches than the West Indies.  The Spanish ladies in the Philippines are dressed as in the ancient cities of their own renowned peninsula.  The Filipinos are of the varied styles that adorn Africans and the Asiatics.  They are gay in colors and curious in the adjustment of stuffs, from the flimsy jackets to the fantastic skirts.  The first essential in the dress of a Filipino is a jacket cut low, the decolette feature being obscured to some extent by pulling out one shoulder and covering the other, taking the chances of the lines that mark the concealment and disclosure of breast and back.  There is no expression of immodesty.  The woman of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising the disappointed dreams of long ago.  Profounder grief than is read in the faces of bronze and copper no mourning artist has wrought nor gloomy poet written.  Below the jacket, the everlasting blazer, is a liberal width of cloth tightly drawn about the loins, stomach and hips, making no mistake in revelations of the original outline drawings, or the flexibilities which the activities display.  There are two skirts, an outer one that opens in front, showing the tunic, which is of a color likely to be gaudy and showing strangely with the outer one.  The feet are exposed, and if not bare, clothed only in clumsy slippers with toe pieces, and neither heels nor uppers.  Women carry burdens on their heads, and walk erect and posed as if for snap photographs.  The young girls are fond of long hair, black as cannel coal, and streaming in a startling cataract to the hips.  It seems that the crop of hair is unusually large, and it shines with vitality, as the breeze lifts it in the sunshine.  The Philippine boys are still more lightly clad than the girls, who have an eye to queer combinations of colors, and the revelation of the lines that distinguish the female form without flagrant disclosure.  There is much Philippine dressing that may under all the surroundings be called modest, and the prevalent expression of the Filipino is that of fixed but bewildered grief.  The males are rather careless, and display unstinted the drawings of legs, that are copper-colored and more uniform in tint than symmetry.  Two or three rags do a surprisingly extensive service, and all the breezes cause the fluttering of fantastic but scanty raiment.  It is a comfort to return to a country where people wear clothing not as a flimsy and inadequate disguise.  What will be the influence of our armies bent to the tropics, upon the dress of Americans?  It is a question that may be important.  The “wheel”