nd far between were these, for the
natives were encouraged to remain indoors after nine o'clock, and the
soldiers forbidden to be out. The streets were deserted save by
occasional carriage or carromatta bearing army or navy officers, or what
were termed the foreign residents--English or German as a rule--from
club or calls to their quarters.

"Lights out" sounded early at the barracks of the soldiery, for they
were up with the dawn for breakfast that they might be through with
their hardest drills before the heat of the day. The "pool rooms,"
as the big _Americanos_ called these "wide open," single-tabled
billiard saloons that flourished in almost every block, were required
to put up their shutters at nine o'clock, and every discoverable
establishment in which gambling had prevailed in other form had long
since been closed by a stony-hearted chief of police, whose star was
worn on each shoulder rather than the left breast, and who, to the
incredulous amaze of Spaniard and Filipino alike, listened unmoved to
the pleas of numerous prominent professors of the gambling industry,
even when backed by proffers of a thousand a week in gold. That the
"_partida de billar_" had not also been suppressed was due to the
fact that, like Old Sledge in the Kentucky Court, its exponents
established it to be, not a game of chance, but skill, and such, indeed,
it proved to every Yankee who put up his money against the bank. With an
apparently congenital gift of sleight of hand, developed by years of
practice at pitch penny from toddling babyhood to cock-fighting
adolescence, the native could so manipulate the tools of his game that
no outsider had the faintest "show for his money," while, as against
each other, as when Greek met Greek, it became a battle of the giants, a
trial of almost superhuman skill. It was the one game left to adult
Tagalhood in which he might indulge his all-absorbing and unconquerable
passion to play for money. All over town and suburbs wandered countless
natives with wondering game-cocks under their arms, suffering for a
chance to spur if not to "scrap," for even the national sport had been
stopped. Never in all the services in all the churches of Luzon had such
virtue been preached as that practised by these heartless, soulless
invaders from across the wide Pacific--men who stifled gambling and
scorned all bribes. "Your chief of police is no gentleman," declared
certain prominent merchants, arrested for smuggling