The bat was a board about eight inches wide, wrenched from the lid of a Batoum oil case and roughly cut down at one end for a handle.  With the size of the ball, and the width of the bat, missing was an impossibility.  It was only a question of how far the strength of the batter could send the ball.  When it was struck, everybody ran to the next base, and seemed to feel if he got there before the ball hit ground, he had scored something.

Rosario, as I said, was both third base and umpire (after a run they always reverted to their original positions).  Her voice rang out in a symphony like this:  “Wan stri’!  Wan ball!  Fou’ ball!  Ilapog! ilapog sa acon!  Hindi!  Ilapog sa firs’ base!  Fou’ ball.”

At times when somebody on a base made a feint of stealing a run (for they were acting out everything as they had seen it done at the last public match), Manuel threatened all points of the compass with his four-inch projectile, and again the voice of Rosario soared, “Ilapog—­Ilapog sa firs’ base—­Hindi! sa Ceferiana! ah (ow-ut)!” while an enthusiastic onlooker who had set down a bamboo pipe filled with tuba dulce (the unfermented sap of the nipa palm or the cocoanut tree) added his lungs to the uproar in probably the only two English words he knew—­“Play ball! play ball!”

Thus are the beginnings of great movements in small things.  Those children got more real Americanism out of that corrupted ball game than they did from singing “My Country, ’tis of Thee” every morning.

From a baseball game to a fire is a far cry, but fire in the Philippines has such distinctive features that I cannot pass it without a word.  The lack of all facilities for combating it makes it an ever present menace.  The combustible materials of which houses are built, and their close crowding together, tend to spread it rapidly; while the thatched roofs make even the burning of an isolated house a danger to the entire community.

Manila has an up-to-date American fire department, but even there, with water mains and a signal-box system for alarms, a fire once started in a nipa district in the dry season can seldom be checked until the neighborhood is clean swept.  In the provinces, where there is not so much as a bucket brigade, the first alarm sends everybody’s heart into his mouth.

The chief trouble is the lack of water for putting out a fire in its incipiency.  Never was there a land in which water was more abundant or more scarce than it is in the Philippines.  For five months of every year the skies let down a deluge, but nothing appreciable of all the downfall is saved.  The rich—­the haughty, ostentatious rich—­have great masonry tanks walled up at the ends of their houses, capable of holding two or three thousand gallons of water.  With the contents of these tanks the rich people supply themselves with drinking water during the dry season, and net a considerable income from its sale to their less fortunate neighbors.  The merely well-to-do people content themselves with a galvanized iron tank, which may store from two to six hundred gallons, which is seldom enough to last out the dry season.  In this case they buy water from the mountaineers, who fill their tinajas, or twenty-gallon earthenware jars, with water from mountain springs, and bring them to the nearest towns in bancas.