culverts except those made of concrete or masonry.

On my arrival in Benguet in 1901, I found that good progress had been
made on the upper end of the road, which had penetrated for a short
distance into the canon proper without encountering any considerable
obstacles.

On October 15, 1901, the commission stated in its annual report to the
secretary of war, "He [509] has been much delayed by the difficulty of
procuring the labour necessary for its early completion, and several
months will yet elapse before it is finished!" They did!

On August 20, 1901, Captain Meade was relieved, and Mr. N. M. Holmes
was made engineer of the road.

On February 3, 1902, a little sanitarium was opened in a small native
house at Baguio. During the following July I was sent to it as a
patient, and while in Benguet again inspected the road which had been
continued high up on the canon wall to a point where, on a very steep
mountain side, a peculiar rock formation had been encountered at the
very grass roots. This rock disintegrated rapidly under the action
of the sun when exposed to it. Comparatively solid in the morning,
it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before
night. A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous
mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four
feet in width, which threatened to go out at any moment.

My trip to Baguio promptly relieved a severe attack of acute intestinal
trouble from which I had been suffering, and when Governor Taft fell
ill the following year with a similar ailment, and his physicians
recommended his return to the United States, I did my best to persuade
him to try Baguio instead. He decided to do so.

Five rough cottages had meanwhile been constructed for the use of
the commissioners, the lumber for them being sawed by hand on the
ground. Boards had been nailed to frames as rapidly as they fell
from the logs, and had shrunk to such an extent that a reasonably
expert marksman might almost have thrown a cat by the tail through
any one of the houses. At night they looked like the old-fashioned
perforated tin lanterns, leaking light in a thousand places. These
were the luxurious homes provided for the high officials of the
government of which so much has been said!

We paid for them an annual rental amounting to ten per cent of their
cost, which had of course been excessively high on account of the
necessity of packing everything used in the