s low house.

The cook and the houseboy looked after him with the unobtrusive
perfection of service found only in the East. A good breakfast cheered
a stomach outraged by the greasy mess perpetrated upon native boats in
the name of Spanish cookery, and a cool shower bath eliminated the
stench of stale copra which had clung to his nostrils if not to his
clothing. An hour before noon he left the house and strolled about the
scorching town, regardless of where he went so long as he found shaded
walks on which to tread.

* * * * *

Most Philippine towns are coast towns, and most coast towns are flat
and uninteresting unless you are interested in their peoples--and you
are not interested in them unless they are of a different tribe than
you have known previously.

Take a couple of dusty--or muddy--streets, unroll them along some
freshwater stream just above a line of palmed beach: place an immense,
deserted-looking softstone church in an unkept square flanked with a
few straggled acacias and a big convent in which a native priest lives
in weary and squalid detachment from a world he knows nothing about:
line the two streets with an assortment of rusty bamboo and
mixed-material houses which impress one as never having been built but
as always having stood there: sprinkle a few naked, pot-bellied, brown
children staring at each other in pathetic, Malay ignorance of the
manner and spirit of play: set a few brown manikins in the open
windows--women who let life fly by in dull wonder of what it is all
about: add a few carabaos lying in neck-deep content in mudwallows,
and a score of emaciated curs which snarl at each other in habitual,
gnawing hunger and which greet their masters with terrified whines:
spread over it all a pall of still moist heat and a sky arched by a
molten sun. Contrive all this, then imbue every object--human and
creature, animate and inanimate,--with an air of hopelessness, of the
futility of effort, and you will have a typical Malay town as the
Americans found them.

But not so where the American has set his impious foot--impious of the
dogma that you can not change the East, nor hurry it. He enjoyed the
finesse of the phrase, quoted it, then jumped in to hustle the East.
The old timers,--Spaniards and Britishers for the greater
part--shrugged at each other over their heavy tiffins and nine o'clock
dinners; these crazy Americans would soon learn! But the crazy,
enthusia