the truth would have served their ends so much better that
it seems as if they must have been doing mendacious gymnastics simply
to keep themselves in practice; but they will hardly ever steal. If
they do, it will be sometime when you are looking squarely at them,
carrying a thing off from under your very nose with a cleverness
which they seem to think, and you can hardly help feel yourself,
makes them deserve praise instead of blame. I have repeatedly left
much valuable property with them, as I did in this case with Mateo,
and have come back to find every article just as I had left it.

Mateo was glad to see me. "Oh Senor," he began, before my clothes were
fairly changed, and while he was settling my things in my bed room,
"there is so much to tell you."

I knew he would be bursting with news of what had happened during my
absence. "Such goings on," he continued, folding my travelling clothes
into a tin trunk, where the white ants could not get at them. "You
never heard the likes of it."

I am translating very freely, for I have noticed that the thoughts
expressed by the Philippine gossip are very similar to those of his
fellow in America, or Europe, or anywhere else, no matter how much
the words may differ.

"The new Sultana, the handsome Visayan girl, has given birth to a son,
and has so bewitched the Sultan by her good looks and craftiness
that he has decreed her son, and not Ahmeya's, to be the heir to
the throne. She rules the palace now, and when her servants bear her
through the streets the people bow down to her." He added, with a look
behind him to see that no one overheard, "Because they dare not do
otherwise. In their hearts they love Ahmeya, and hate this vain woman."

"How does Ahmeya take it?" I asked.

"Hardly, people think, although she makes no cry. She goes not through
the streets of the town, now, but stays shut in her own rooms, with
her women and the boy."

A furious beating against the bamboo walls of my sleeping room,
and wild cries from some one on the ground outside, awoke me one
morning when I had been back in Culion less than a week. The house
in which I slept, like most of the native houses in the Philippines,
was built on posts, several feet above the ground, for the sake of
coolness and as a protection against snakes and such vermin.

It was very early, not yet sunrise. A servant of the Sultan's, gray
with fright, was pounding on the walls of the house with a long spear
to wake