renders to the wooing, the happy
pair dancing away together while the music plays faster and faster
until at last it stops with a great crash, that, we trust, not being
symbolical of infelicity in wedlock. The dance was very well done,
and the native audience enjoyed it thoroughly, calling out chaffingly
in Visayan to the couple on the floor, and occasionally beating time
to the music with hand or foot.

It was at this ball we met for the first time a family of American
_mestizas_--three sisters there were, if I remember rightly,--all
pretty girls, with regular features and soft brown hair, this
hair distinguishing them at once from the other women of the place
with their more conventional blue-black tresses. It seems that the
grandfather of these girls had been an American sailor, who for some
reason or other was marooned at Cagayan, Mindanao. Making the most, or
as a pessimist might think, the worst of a disadvantageous situation,
he married a native girl and raised a large and presumably interesting
family, his descendants being scattered all over the island. The
Misamis branch were extremely aristocratic, and so proud of their
blue blood that since the arrival of the American troops they have
associated with no one else in the village. It is said that the
girls even refer to the United States as "home," and occasionally
wear European clothes in preference to the far more becoming and
picturesque costume of _saya_, _camisa_, and _panuela_.

While in Misamis I verily believe that family was pointed out to us
twenty times at least, and whenever a man lowered his voice and started
in with, "You see those girls over there? Well, their grandfather was
an American--" I steeled myself for what was to follow, and expressed
surprise and interest as politely as possible, for it is hard to attain
conventional incredulity over a twice-told tale. After the genealogy
of the family had been gone over, root and branch, we would invariably
be told the story of how the grandfather, grown rich and prosperous
in his island home, once went to Manila on a business trip. He had
then lived in Mindanao over thirty years, during which time he had
spoken nothing but Visayan, varied occasionally with bad Spanish.

His negotiations at the capital taking him to an English firm,
he started to address them in his long unused mother tongue, when
to his extreme mortification he found he could not speak a word of
English. Again and again he tried,