Diet.
For the benefit of Boston readers (if I should be lucky enough to have any in that learned city), I may say that pork and beans is not a suitable diet for a tropical country. I should also forbid the “New England dinner,” and roast goose, or sucking pig, stewed terrapin, and pumpkin pie. A light diet of eggs or the excellent fish to be had in Manila, chickens fattened on maize, beef or mutton, once a day, and rice, vegetables and salad, with plenty of ripe fruit, according to the season, is desirable. The fare can be diversified by oysters, prawns, crabs, wild duck, snipe, and quail, all of which are cheap and very good in the season. There are no pheasants in Luzon, but the jungle cock (labuyao) is as good or better.
In the tropics a good table is a necessity, for the appetite needs tempting. Such a diet as I have mentioned will keep you in health, especially if you are careful not to eat too much, but to eat of the best. If you economise on your table you will have to spend the money at the drug-store. Taboo pork, because—well, when you have been a week or two in the country you will not need to ask why—Moses and Mahomet knew what they were about.
My remarks about drinks are intended for the men, as ladies do not need any advice on this subject. In a tropical climate it is necessary to be very careful in the use of spirits.
Having lived for more than twenty-five years in the tropics, and having kept my health remarkably well, I feel warranted in giving my experience. I have made surveys, or directed works, in many climates, exposed to all weathers, and I know that the very worst thing a man can take, if he has to work or march in the sun, is spirits. There is nothing that will predispose him to sunstroke as much as spirits. For marching, walking, or shooting, in the sun, I know nothing like cold tea without milk or sugar. It should be poured off the leaves after infusing for two minutes.
When you reach shelter you can take a lemon squash or a cagelada—this is the juice of cageles (a kind of orange) with sugar and water—which is a most cooling drink. Never take spirits to buck you up to your work. Whatever spirits you drink, let it be after sunset. I am a believer in drinking wine at meals; it makes me shudder to see people drinking tea, lemonade, or milk, with their dinners, and laying up for themselves torments from dyspepsia, for which they have to swallow pills by the boxful.