into disconsolate tears.

Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead
when Tandang Selo gazed from the window at the people in their festival
garments going to the town to attend the high mass. Nearly all led
by the hand or carried in their arms a little boy or girl decked out
as if for a fiesta.

Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta
for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who,
it may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread. They are roused
early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything new, dear,
and precious that they possess--high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or
velvet suits, without overlooking four or five scapularies, which
contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to
the high mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat
and the human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if
they are not made to recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored,
or asleep. At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing
they are pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh
or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest against
so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.

Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their
relatives' hands. There they have to dance, sing, and recite all
the amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether
comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal pinchings
and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give
them cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear
nothing more. The only positive results they are accustomed to get from
the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations,
and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with
candy and cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the
custom, and Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals,
which afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.

Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta,
by visiting their parents and their parents' relatives, crooking
their knees, and wishing them a merry Christmas. Their Christmas
gift consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water, or some
insignificant present.

Tandang Selo saw all his friends pass and thought sadly that this
year he had n