half that distance apart. Chairs,
tables, benches, a cupboard, a few small ornaments, a mirror, and some
lithographs in frames, composed the furniture of the interior. The
cleanliness of the house and the arrangement of its contents testified
to the existence of order and prosperity.

[Tapis weaving.] I found the women in almost all the houses occupied
in weaving tapis, which have a great reputation in the Manila
market. They are narrow, thickly-woven silk scarves, six varas in
length, with oblique white stripes on a dark-brown ground. They are
worn above the sarong.

[Petaca cigar cases.] Baliwag is also especially famous for its
petaca [60]cigar-cases, which surpass all others in delicacy of
workmanship. They are not made of straw, but of fine strips of Spanish
cane, and particularly from the lower ends of the leaf-stalks of the
calamusart, which is said to grow only in the province of Nueva Ecija.

[Preparation of material.] A bundle of a hundred selected stalks,
a couple of feet long, costs about six reals. When these stalks have
been split lengthways into four or five pieces, the inner wood is
removed, till nothing but the outer part remains. The thin strips
thus obtained are drawn by the hand between a convex block and a
knife fixed in a sloping position, and between a couple of steel
blades which nearly meet.

[Costly weaving.] It is a task requiring much patience and
practice. In the first operation, as a rule, quite one-half of the
stems are broken, and in the second more than half, so that scarcely
twenty per cent of the stalks survive the final process. In very fine
matting the proportionate loss is still greater. The plaiting is done
on wooden cylinders. A case of average workmanship, which costs two
dollars on the spot, can be manufactured in six days' uninterrupted
labor. Cigar-cases of exceptionally intricate workmanship, made to
order for a connoisseur, frequently cost upwards of fifty dollars.

[Volcanic stone quarries.] Following the Quingua from Baliwag up its
stream, we passed several quarries, where we saw the thickly-packed
strata of volcanic stone which is used as a building material. The
banks of the river are thickly studded with prickly bamboos from
ten to twelve feet high. The water overflows in the rainy season,
and floods the plain for a great distance. Hence the many shells of
large freshwater mussels which are to be seen lying on the earth which
covers the volcanic deposit. The