On the walls of churches and conventos too are found pictures in oil, often gloomy, full of tortures and death, as Spanish paintings incline to be, yet essentially true art—­pictures which it is to be hoped will survive the inundation of American commercial energy.  The extract-of-beef advertisements and the varied “girls” of all pursuits have found their way into the Philippines; and the Filipino, to our sorrow be it said, takes kindly to them.

So far as the Filipino knows pageantry, it is the pageantry of the Church.  He knows no civic processions, no industrial pomp, such as exploits itself in the Mardi Gras at New Orleans, or the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis.  He is even a stranger to the torchlight procession of politics, and the military displays of our civil holidays.  Neither the Masons, nor the Knights Templars, nor the Knights of Pythias, nor the Ancient Order of Hibernians, with their plumes and banners, have any perceptible foothold in the Philippines.  But in Holy Week and certain other great festival or penitential seasons of the Church, the great religious processions take place—­floats sheathed in bunting and decked with innumerable candles in crystal shades, carrying either the altar of the Virgin or some of the many groups of figures picturing events in the life and passion of the Saviour.  Almost every provincial family of wealth owns one of these cars, and the wooden figures surmounted by wax heads, which constitute the group.  At the proper seasons the figures are clothed in gorgeous raiment decked with jewels, and the car is put at the service of the Church for use in the procession.  The floats are placed about a hundred yards apart, and between them the people form in two parallel lines, one on each side of the street, every person carrying a lighted candle.  When there are twenty or thirty floats, and half as many bands, the glitter and brilliancy of it all strikes even our satiated minds.  What must it be to the untravelled child of the soil?

When the Filipinos win a fight or an election, or fall heirs to any particular luck, they do not express their enthusiasm as we do in fire crackers, noise, and trades processions.  They go sedately to church and sing the Te Deum.  And as we enjoy the theatre, not merely for the play, but for the audience and its suggestions of a people who have put care behind them and have met to exhibit their material prosperity in silks and jewels, so do the Filipinos enjoy the splendor of the congregation on feast days.  The women are robed as for balls in silken skirts of every hue—­azure, rose, apple-green, violet, and orange.  Their filmy camisas and panuelos are painted in sprays of blossoms or embroidered in silks and seed pearls.  On their gold-columned necks are diamond necklaces, and ropes of pearls half as big as bird’s eggs; while the black lace mantillas are fastened to their dusky heads by jewelled birds, and butterflies of emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds.