We talked little, and were content to drink in the silence and the strangeness, till by and by the wind fell cooler and we knew the dawn was at hand.  It seemed to come suddenly, bursting out of the east in a white glare, without the pearly tints and soft gray lights that mark our northern day births.  Then the white glare changed to red, to a crimson glow that painted the world with its glory, and dying, left little nebulous masses floating in the azure, tinted with pink, gold, and purple.

With the first touch of light we turned out of the main river, which was now a broad estuary as it neared the sea, and fled down a water lane not over fifteen or twenty feet wide, absolutely walled with impenetrable nipa growths.  From this we emerged just as the day played its last spectacular effects, and found ourselves in a deep oval indentation, glassy as an inland lake, whose bosom caught the changing cloud tints like a mirror, and whose deep cool green borders were alive with myriads of delighted birds, skimming, chattering, calling.  Half a mile away, at its farther end, the surf leaped frothily over a bar, and beyond that the open sea tumbled and flashed in the first sun-rays.  It was idyllic—­and on our left a mere stone’s throw, it seemed, behind the embowering forest, the mountain of our quest thrust a treeless, grassy shoulder into the blue.

Mr. L——­, however, warned us that our way was still long and circuitous.  We crossed the lagoon and went wandering off down a green, silent waterway which rejoiced in the appellation of “kut-i-kut” and proved itself unworthy of the same.  The tide was going out rapidly, and the water mark oh the tree trunks was growing high.  Sometimes we met a baroto on its way to market with a cargo of three chickens, five cocoanuts, two bunches of bananas, one head of the family, four children, and several women unaccounted for.  The freight was heaped at one end, and the passengers all squatted in that perfect, uncommunicative equilibrium which a Filipino can maintain for hours at a time.  Sometimes we came out where there were almost a hundred square yards of ground and two or three houses and the stir of morning life.  Ladies with a single garment looped under their arm pits were pouring water over themselves from cocoanut shells, and whole colonies of game-cocks were tethered out on the end of three feet of twine, cursing each other and challenging each other to fights.  The male population almost to a man was engaged in the process of stroking the legs of these jewels, to make them strong, and some of the children were helping.

As a rule, our advent generally disturbed these morning devotions, for American women were still comparatively new and few in the province at that time.  A shout, “Americanas!” usually brought the whole village to the waterside, where they bowed and smiled and stared, proffering hospitality, and exchanging repartee with the lieutenant, who used the vernacular.