At present the nearest real bond between American and Filipino is baseball—­“playball” the Filipinos call it, having learned to associate these words with it from the enthusiastic shouts of American onlookers.  Baseball has taken firm hold, and is here to stay.  In Manila every plot of green is given over to its devotees.  Every secondary school in the country has its nine and its school colors and yell, and the pupils go out and “root” as enthusiastically as did ever freshmen of old Yale or Harvard.  No Fourth of July can pass without its baseball game.

We had a good baseball team at Capiz as early as 1903, and played matches with school teams from neighboring towns.  I did not realize, however, how popular the game had become until one warm afternoon, when I was vainly trying to get a nap.

The noise under my window was deafening.  Thuds, shrieks, a babble of native words, and familiar English terms floated in and disturbed my rest.  Finally I got up and went to the window.

The street was not over twenty-five feet wide, the houses, after native custom, being flush with the gutter.  In this narrow space my servants had started a game of ball.  They had the diamond all marked out, and one player on each base.  There was Ceferiana, the cook, a maid of seventeen, with her hair twisted into a Sappho knot at the back with one wisp hanging out like a horse’s tail.  Her petticoat was wrapped tightly around her slim body and its back fulness tucked in at the waist.  She was barefooted, and her toes, wide apart as they always are when shoes have never been worn, worked with excitement.  There was Manuel, who skated the floors, an anaemic youth of fifteen or sixteen, dressed in a pair of dirty white underdrawers with the ankle strings dragging, and in an orange and black knit undershirt.  There was Rosario, the little maid who waited on me and went to school.  She was third base and umpire.  A neighbor’s boy, about eight years old, was first base.  Manuel was second base and pitcher combined.  Ceferiana was at the bat, while behind her her youngest brother—­he whose engaging smile occupied so much of my attention at the funeral of the lavandero aforementioned—­was spread out in the attitude of a professional catcher.  His plump, rounded little legs were stretched so far apart that he could with difficulty retain his balance.  He scowled, smacked his lips, and at intervals thumped the back of his pudgy, clenched fist into the hollowed palm of the other hand with the gesture of a man who wears the catcher’s mitt.  Had a professional baseball team from the States ever caught sight of that baby, they would have secured him as a mascot at any price.

The ball was one of those huge green oranges which the English call pomeloes, about twice the size of an American grape-fruit.  Being green, and having a skin an inch thick; it withstood the resounding thwacks of the bat quite remarkably.  It was fortunate that the diamond was so small, for it would have taken more strength than any of the players possessed to send that plaything any distance.  Catching it was only the art of embracing.  It had to be guided and hugged to the breast, for it was too big to hold in the hands.  The valorous catcher, in spite of his fiercely professional air, invariably dodged it and then pursued it.