spokesman and in his native visayan
tongue made a heart-rending appeal for aid which we were powerless to
give. Attention was called to a leper woman, apparently about
twenty-five years of age, whose face had been attacked by the disease
and whose appearance was truly pathetic. Upon her hip was a child
about a year and a half old and, strange to say, the child showed as
yet no signs whatever of the disease.

What an indissoluble enigma is life! Here in a little cluster of grass
huts in a secluded nook of a secluded island of an all but secluded
archipelago was gathered together a little community of wretched
natives, driven by their loathsomeness from association with others
even of the same half-savage race. Yet here, men and women loved and
were married, by mutual trust if not by law, and children were born of
the union to live forever under the unspeakable horror that
overshadowed the unfortunate parents. Love, hatred, sorrow, and
joy--every passion that enters into the complex structure of the human
heart even here, in this scene of sadness and despair, was playing
apparently as freely as where misfortune and disease had never crossed
the portals of life.

CHAPTER IX.

A "HIKE."

We were lounging lazily in our hammocks at Jimamaylan one evening in
April. Supper was just ended, and the soldiers in the post were
collected in groups here and there spinning yarns to pass away the
time, when a Filipino clad only in a loin cloth came down the street
at a steadily swinging run and stopped in front of the sentry. He
brought the announcement that a band of ladrones had just burned a
sugar mill and were advancing to sack a barrio about fifteen miles
away.

The invitation of the commanding officer to go on a "hike" was eagerly
accepted, and, in ten minutes after the message was given, the troops
were on the march followed by two adventurous pedagogues.

Darkness was just closing in as we left the town, but a resplendent
tropic moon soon made the night almost as brilliant as the day. The
trail we followed led over rough and rocky country. Sometimes for a
distance of a mile or more we passed over barren wastes of volcanic
slag poured out in anger by some peak whose convulsions have long
since ceased. Again we would descend into a tropical jungle from the
dense foliage of which the ladrones could have leaped at any moment,
had they known of our coming, and annihilated our little band. We
forded rapid streams with