eparations for the wedding feast. I met the little Maraquita at
Bazon's reception, and conversed with her through an interpreter. "The
_senorita_ says," so the interpreter informed me, "she appreciates your
conversation very much, and thinks you play the piano very well. She
has a new piano in her house that came from Paris. In a little while
the _senorita_ will depart for Spain, where she intends to study in
a convent for a year." Ah, Maraquita! She had had an _Insurrecto_
general for a suitor, and had turned him down. And she had jilted
Joe, the French constabulary officer, and had rejected a neighboring
merchant's offer for her hand of fifty carabaos. I have to-day a
small reminder of her dainty needlework--a family of Visayan dolls
which she had dressed according to the native mode.

One day the undertaker's boat dropped in with a detachment of the
burial corps aboard. The bodies of the soldiers that had slept for so
long in the convent garden were removed, and taken in brass caskets
back across the sea....

We started out one morning on constabulary ponies, brilliantly
caparisoned in scarlet blankets and new saddles. "Ichabod," the
Kansas _maestro_, had proposed to guide us to Misamis over the
mountain trail. It was not long, however, before one spoke of
trails in the past tense. The last place that was on the map--a
town of questionable loyalty, that we had gladly left late in the
afternoon--now seemed, as we remembered it, in contrast with the
wilderness, a small metropolis. The Kansan still insisted that he was
not lost. "Do you know where we are?" I asked. "Wa-al," he replied,
"those mountains ought to be 'way over on the other side of us,
and the flat side of the moon ought to be turned the other way." We
wandered for ten hours through prairies of tall buffalo-grass, at
last discovering a trail that led down to the sea. The ponies were as
stiff as though they had been made of wood instead of flesh and blood.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at the doctor's. Old Tom did the cooking,
and Vivan, all smiles, waited upon the guests. Stuffed chicken and
roast sucking pig, and a young kid that the _muchachos_ had tortured
to death that morning, sawing its throat with a dull knife, were
the main courses. Padre Pastor, who had held a special mass that
morning for Americans, "returned thanks," rolling his eyes, and
saying something about the flowers not being plentiful or fragrant,
but the stars, exceptional in brilliance