By half-past six o’clock, when the tropical dusk had closed down, the little guests began to arrive, each in charge of a servant.  There were twenty-five twinkling, berry-eyed babelets with their satiny black down hanging like bangs over their eyes, and their tubby little stomachs covered with fine garments and bound about with gorgeous sashes.  They squatted on their little heels and sucked their little thumbs, and waited in wondering patience for this strange mystery to occur.  As many American children would have made the air noisy for a block around.

The windows of the house were thrown wide open, and the sliding doors which pull back all around the base boards were open too, so that the whole interior was visible from the street below.  There a great crowd had gathered, men, women, and children, beggars, and many of the elder brothers and sisters of the favored guests within.  Nearly every child was displaying a toy that seems to be the special evidence of Christmas in the Philippines—­some sort of animal made of tissue paper and mounted on wheels.  It is lighted within like a paper lantern, and can be dragged about.  Great is the pride in these transparencies, and great the ambition displayed in the construction.  Pigs, dogs, cats, birds, elephants, and tigers, of most weird and imposing proportions they are, and no few feuds and jealousies grew out of their possession.

When the coverings were drawn off the tree, and the candles were lighted, the crowd in the street waxed quite vociferous, but the babies merely uttered little ecstatic sighs.  They took their presents and turned the toys over gravely, and sucked gingerly at the sweets.  Then one by one they marched out to join their relatives and the transparencies.

We had a good dinner and drank to the homeland and a merry Christmas.  Afterwards Captain C——­ leaned out of the window and cried to us to look at the snow.  The moon was just overhead, ringed round with a field of cirrus clouds.  They were piled one on top of another, glistening and cool, with the sheen of real snow by moonlight.  I have never seen such an effect in our own land, and only once subsequently here.

There was a ball that night, and we were all going.  While we were at dinner, the waits came in and sang in the hallway just as in merry England they sing under the window.  But if the English waits sing as badly as the Filipino ones, then the poetry of the wait songs is gone from me forever.  These of ours were provided with tambourines, and they sang an old Latin chant with such throaty voices that it sounded as if the tones were being dragged out by the roots.