Between the two stone schoolhouses at Capiz was a connecting house of nipa where in ante-insurrection days the native teachers had their quarters.  At first the horde of beggars were allowed to make their headquarters in this; but on the arrival of the Division Superintendent, he protested against sowing the seeds of disease among school children in that way.  So the paupers were driven forth and found shelter wherever they could, in barns and unused houses.

In the following June a part of the older pupils were separated from the others and placed in a room in the tribunal, as the nucleus of an intermediate school.  I was in charge of them, and noticed one day a heap of rags lying on a pile of boards underneath the opposite wing of the building.  Presently the rag heap began to twist and turn and throw arms about and then to scream.  I went over to investigate, and found a girl of fourteen or fifteen nearly dead.  Her skeleton body was covered with sores, her eyes seemed sightless, and the flies had settled in clouds around them and her nostrils.  She would lie on the hard boards a few minutes until the torment grew unendurable, and then break into screams and lamentations.  The rooms of all the municipal officers were about her, she was in full sight of the police, and yet there she lay and suffered with no human being to help her.  Naturally I went to the Mayor, or Presidente.  He wanted to know, with some irritation, what was to be expected when the School Superintendent refused to let the school building be used by the poor.  After some talk the girl was removed to a house and assistance given her.  She was past the need of food, and died in less than twenty-four hours.

The aforementioned nipa house between the two schoolhouses was utilized for janitors’ quarters, and the arrangement was such that pupils leaving the room temporarily passed through it.  One day one of the children casually remarked that some one was sick in there with viruela (smallpox).  I went in and found a child apparently in the worst stages of confluent smallpox.  Now in our own dear America this would have meant almost hysteria.  There would have been head lines an inch deep in the local papers, the school would have been closed for two weeks, a general vaccination furor would have set in, and many mammas and little children would have dreamed of confluent smallpox for weeks to come.  But we did none of these things in the Philippines.  We merely requested the authorities to remove the smallpox patient, and ordered the janitor to scrub the room with soap and water.  Nobody quitted school; nobody got the smallpox; and the whole thing was only an incident.

Later I was destined to pass through the cholera epidemic of 1902-03, and I realized how great a factor a daily paper is in creating public hysteria.  Part of the time I was in Manila, where the disease was under much better control than it ever was in the provinces (where it was not under control at all), and there was about five or six times as much worry, talk, and excitement in Manila as ever prevailed outside,