other service.  Then he got the Filipino Governor to send out written invitations from his office in such a way that the affair assumed the complexion of a national courtesy offered by the Filipino to the American.  For us, as Government employees, to disregard this was impossible.  So we went en masse to the Roman Catholic church, where two rows of high-backed chairs were arranged facing each other up the centre of the church for our high mightinesses.

We had agreed privately that after the Te Deum we would go over to the Protestant chapel, and not leave the poor missionary to feel himself wholly deserted.  But no opportunity came.  The service was prolonged till any hope of our appearing in the rival chapel was effectually quashed.  When we came out, we looked at one another and burst out laughing.  It was one more evidence that the American is no match for the Filipino in finesse.

Naturally, unless one falls in with the Filipino devotion to dancing, there are few sources of so-called amusement in provincial life.  The American women visit each other and give dinners, which, to the men who live in helpless subjection to an ignorant native cook, are less a social than a gastronomic joy.  If we are near the seashore, we make up picnics on the beach, swim, dig clams, and cook supper over a fire of driftwood.  If thirst overtakes us, we send a native up a tree for green cocoanuts.  He cuts a lip-shaped hole in the shell with two strokes of his bolo, and there is water, crystal clear and fresh.  The men hunt snipe and wild ducks, and sometimes wild pigs and deer.

In default of travelling theatrical companies, the provincial natives have their own organizations of local talent and present little plays in either Spanish or the native tongue.  If American troops are stationed near a town, there will be one or two minstrel shows each year.  The Filipinos all go to these, but they don’t understand them very well and are not edified.  I think they imagine that the cake walk is a national dance with us, and that the President of the United States leads out some important lady for this at inaugural balls.

Once in a while a travelling cinematograph outfit roams through the provinces, and then for a tariff of twenty-five cents Mexican we throng the little theatre night after night.  I remember once a company of “barn-stormers” from Australia were stranded in Iloilo.  They had a moving picture outfit, and a young lady attired in a pink costume de ballet stood plaintively at one side and sang, plaintively and very nasally, a long account of the courting of some youthful Georgia couple.  The lovers embraced each other tenderly (as per view) in an interior that had a “throw” over every picture corner, table, and chair back.  Some huge American soldier down in the pit said, “That’s the real thing; no doubt about it,” but whether his words had reference to the love-making or the room we could not tell.