The harbor at Romblon resembles a lake guarded by mountains which are covered with cocoanut trees clear to their summits.  At one end—­the end toward the entrance, which no unfamiliar eye can detect—­a great plateau mountain called Tablas stretches across the view in lengthened bulk like the sky-line of some submarine upheaval.  The waters are gayly colored, shadowed into exquisite greens by the plumy mountains above; and in a little valley lies the white town of Romblon with its squat municipal buildings, its gray old church, and a graceful campanile rising from a grassy plaza.  They have dammed a mountain stream, so that the town is bountifully supplied with pure cold water, and with its clean streets and whitewashed buildings, it is a most attractive place.

The inhabitants of Romblon were eager to sell us mats, or petates, the making of which is a special industry there.  Their prices had suffered the rise which is an inevitable result of American occupation, and were quite beyond our means.  I succeeded afterwards in getting some Romblon mats through a Filipino friend for about one-fifth the price asked that day.

Our stay at Romblon was not lengthy.  We got out some time in the late afternoon, and proceeded on our way.  I cannot remember whether we occupied all that night and the next day in getting down to Iloilo or whether we made Iloilo in twelve hours.  I do remember the night trip down the east coast of Panay, with Negros on the invisible left, and all about us a chain of little islands where the fisher folk were engaged in their night work of spearing fish by torchlight.  Dim mountainous shapes would rise out of the sea and loom vaguely in the starlit distance, the curving beaches at their bases outlined by the torches in the bancas till they looked like boulevards with their lines of flickering lamps.  I remember that we fell to singing, and that after we had sung everything we knew, an officer of the First Infantry who was going back to his regiment after a wound and a siege in hospital said enthusiastically:  “Oh, don’t stop.  You don’t know how it sounds to hear a whole lot of American men and women singing together.”

It was somewhere between ten and midnight when a light flashed ahead, and beyond it lay a little maze of twinkles that they said was Iloilo.  The anchor chains ran out with a clang and rattle, for our Spanish captain took no chances, and would not pick his way through the Siete Pecadores at night.

The Siete Pecadores, or Seven Sinners, are a group of islands, or rocks—­for they amount to little more than that—­some six miles north of Iloilo, just at the head of Guimaras Strait.  On the east the long, narrow island of Guimaras, hilly and beautifully wooded, lies like a wedge between Panay and Negros.  Beyond it the seven-thousand-foot volcano, Canlaon, on Negros, lifts a purple head.  On the west lies the swampy foreshore of Panay with a mountain range inland, daring the sunlight with scarpy flanks, on which every ravine and every cleft are sunk in shadows of violet and pink.  The water of the straits is glassy and full of jelly-fish, some of the white dome-like kind, but more of the purple ones that float on the water like a petalled flower.