of Dumaguete,
and how the women manage to keep on their _chinelas_ during these
wild gyrations is quite beyond me.

As the secretario of the town played a harp in the orchestra--surely an
evidence of versatility--we ventured to ask if he would play a two-step
very, very slowly, and hummed it in ordinary time. At its beginning
the Filipinos who had started to dance, stopped aghast. "Faster,
faster!" they cried in Spanish. "No one could dance to such slow
music. This is a ball, men, not a funeral!" But the secretario held
the orchestra back, and in a few moments the Americans had the floor
to themselves, the Filipinos stopping partly because they found it
impossible to dance to such slow music and partly because they wanted
to watch us.

They were all astonished at the apparent lack of motion in American
dancing and the fact that we got over the ground without hopping. Many
of them asked officers stationed in the town if the women wore a
special kind of shoe to balls, as they appeared to be standing still
and yet moving at the same time, while one old man was heard explaining
to his cronies that we wore little wheels attached to the soles of our
slippers--he had seen them--so that we did not have to move at all,
the men doing all the dancing and merely pushing us back and forth
on the floor. So much for the glide step as contrasted with the hop,
though it must be confessed that the natives were quite frank in
liking their own dancing better than ours, one of the reasons being
that it gave them so much more exercise.

During the evening the natives gave a Visayan dance, called in the
native tongue "A Courtship." As the name implies, a young man and woman
dance it _vis-a-vis_, the man courting the woman rhythmically and
to music, she at first resisting, flashing her dark eyes scornfully
as she trips by him, holding her fan to her face until he looks the
other way, then peeping over its top at him, only to turn her back
in disdain when, emboldened by her interest, he approaches. Finally
his attentions become more pronounced, at which the girl grows coy,
dropping her eyes shyly as they dance past one another, and covering
her face again and again from his too ardent gaze; now bending her
supple waist from side to side in time with the passionate music;
now closing her eyes languorously; now opening them wide and smiling
at him tenderly over the top of her fan, a graceful accomplice to
her pretty coquetry. At last she sur