Filipinos who have capital enough all keep one or more pigs.  These are yard scavengers, and, as sanitary measures are little observed by this race, have access to filth that makes the thought of eating their flesh exceedingly repulsive.  When the owners are ready to kill, however, the pig is brought upstairs into the kitchen, where it lives luxuriously on boiled rice, is bathed once a day, and prepared for slaughter like a sacrificial victim.  If you are personally acquainted with a pig of this sort and know the day set for his decease, you may send your servant out to buy fresh pork; otherwise you had better stick to chicken and fish.

Before the Insurrection, when the rinderpest had not yet destroyed the herds, beef cattle were plenty, and meat was cheap enough for even the poorest to enjoy.  A live goat, full grown, was not worth more than a peso (fifty cents gold).  Now there are practically no beef cattle at all, so the only meat available is goats’ flesh, which is sold at from twenty to sixty cents a pound (ten to thirty cents gold).  Americans living in the provinces rely largely upon chicken, though in the coast towns there is always plenty of delicious fish.  There are also oysters (not very good), clams, crabs, shrimps, and crayfish.

One of the most irritating features of housekeeping here is the lack of any fixed value, especially for market produce.  There are no grocery stores, every article must be chaffered over, and is valued according to the owner’s pressing needs, his antipathy for Americans, or his determination to get everything he can.

You may be driving in the country and see a flock of chickens feeding under or near a house.  You ask the price.  The owner has just dined.  There is still enough palay (unhulled rice) to furnish the evening meal.  He has no pressing need of money, and he doesn’t want to disturb himself to run down chickens.  His fowls simply soar as to price.  They are worth anywhere from seventy-five cents to a dollar apiece.  The current price of chickens varies according to size and season from twenty to fifty cents.  You may offer the latter price and be refused.  The next day the very same man may appear at your home, offering for twenty or thirty cents the fowls for which the day before he refused fifty.

Except in the cold storage and the Chino grocery shops of Manila, nothing can be bought without chaffering.  The Filipinos love this; they realize that we are impatient and seldom can hold out long at it, and in many cases they overcharge us from sheer race hatred.  Also they have the idea, as they would express it, that our money is two times as much as theirs, and that therefore we should pay two prices.  Often they put a price from sheer caprice or effrontery and hang to it from obstinacy.  In the same market I have found mangoes of the same quality ranging all the way from thirty cents to a dollar and fifty cents a dozen.