no River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River Nile in
the time of Pharaoh--especially when I looked at the plowing going on
around them. For the Filipino's plow is modelled closely on the old
Egyptian implement, and hasn't been much changed. A properly crooked
small tree or limb serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes
the beam, and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some
of the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A piece of
wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another piece like U with
the prongs pulled wide apart serves as a singletree. Then, with two
pieces of rope connecting primitive hame and single-tree, the
Filipino's harness is complete.

Before going into any further description of the plows, however, let
us get our picture of the typical country on the Island of Luzon as I
saw it on this hot December day. Great fields of rice here and there,
ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring little brown men and women
cutting the crop with old-fashioned knives and sickles; the general
appearance not unlike an American wheat or oat harvest in early
summer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper
two feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some
of it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of
{156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp
low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freight
boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out of single logs.

Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live,
clustered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part of the
world except in America. Surrounded in most cases by the massive
luxuriance of a banana grove, the Filipino's hut stands on stilts as
high as his head, and often higher. One always enters by a ladder. In
most instances there are two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12
feet, and a sort of lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes.
A one-horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger
Filipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, but
of bamboo--the ever-serviceable bamboo--which, as my readers probably
know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole reeds that grow on our river
banks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made of
larger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunks
form the floor; the sides are of split bamb