in Porto Rico
had to wait for his figures until the head of the house climbed down.
(_Courtesy of the Department of War._)]

"Not like our other accession from Spain," Hamilton commented. "I mean
the Philippines; you certainly couldn't call the Filipinos peaceful, it
seems to me that they come just about as wild as they make them."

"Wild? You do not know the half!" said the excitable little editor, who,
despite the frequency of his gestures and the volubility of his
explanations was busily working with diagrams the while. "You know there
was a census in Porto Rico in 1899?"

"I didn't until this morning," the boy answered "but as I see that most
of these tables are compared with that year it is evident that there
must have been."

"There was a census," the editor went on, after a pause during which he
had been working over a column of figures, "and my uncle was a
supervisor. Mr. Gatten--you know him?"

"Only by name," Hamilton replied.

"He was in the Porto Rico census, too. Then in 1903 he went to assist in
the census of the Philippines. It was done by the War Department,
because the fighting was hardly over. You think the census difficult?
You should hear my uncle! The Dattos were not all stopped fighting,
because just as soon as the Philippine Commission thought it safe, the
census began."

"Did any one get killed by hostile natives?" asked Hamilton, scenting a
story.

"Several wounded, one badly, but no one killed. But"--and he waggled a
finger warningly--"there were plenty of places where the census was only
estimated! The blowpipe and the poison arrow are most dangerous. Even
with the soldiers taking the census and going with other census men, it
was very risky among the uncivilized tribes."

"They are really wild?" said Hamilton.

"I think the wildest people in the world, the most savage, are in those
jungles. My uncle had to go to the haunts of the Pygmies."

"Pygmies!" exclaimed Hamilton in surprise. "I didn't know that the Stars
and Stripes floated over Pygmy tribes! I thought they were only in
Africa!"

"The Negritos are pygmies," answered the editor, "seldom over four feet
ten inches for the man and the woman two or three inches shorter; they
use their toes like fingers, they wear only a loin-cloth, their hair is
fuzzy like a black bush, and they seldom use fire, even for cooking."

"How do they live?" asked Hamilton. "We have got used to thinking of the
Red Indians as a part of the United