When I used to write or read I sat on my rattan bed under the mosquito netting; there I could look out of the parted sides of the house to the red hibiscus border of the garden stretching along the narrow Pasig. Boatmen, in conical straw hats, perched at the ends of their bancas, paddled the hollowed-out logs rapidly through the water, or floated idly by, smoking their cigarettes; these boats were loaded to the gunwale with green grasses, and had canopies of matted straw. Launches, too, came chugging past, towing the big high poops covered with straw-screened cascos. Over beyond the river was a flat all in a green tangle, with the thatched nipa houses on their stilts. For the palace stands outside the more thickly settled parts of the city, which in turn surround the walled town.
The Pasig River
Manila to-day is a curious mixture of native nipa shacks and old Spanish churches and forts with the up-to-date American buildings and improvements. There are the different quarters, as in all cities of the Orient—Chinese, native and so on—and each has its own distinctive sights. The street smells, which are never lacking in a city, reminded us of India.
The walled city has picturesque gates breaking through the old gray battlements—the massive wall was begun in 1590—and ancient sentry houses at the corners, while behind rise the white balconies of old convents and monasteries, and buildings now used for government purposes, and towers of churches. The old moats have been filled up for sanitary reasons and are being made into wide sweeps of lawn and flower gardens, and the famous Malecon, the drive beneath the city walls, which was once upon the sea front, has been removed too far inland by the filling of the harbour to retain its old charm.
"Intramuros" (within the walls) more than half the land belongs to the Church, and church buildings abound. These are really inferior, compared with those we saw in Mexico, but some of them are very old. The Augustinian Church, finished in 1605, has enormously thick walls and a stone crypt of marvelous strength.
In the center of the town is Plaza McKinley, but the main business street is the narrow Escolta, made to look still narrower by the overhanging second stories of the buildings.
We visited the botanical gardens, a shaded park with winding paths beneath acacias and mango trees. We drove, too, through the narrow streets of the suburb of San Miguel, where we looked into tangled gardens of tropical plants, behind which were houses with broad verandas and wide-opening sides, covered by a wonderful screen of a sort of mauve morning glory, which blooms, however, all day long.
The native houses are built of bamboo with braided grass walls and thatched roofs, and are raised on stilts because of the rainy season. We went to order some embroidery one day of a Tagalog woman. Climbing a ladder into a small house, we saw the whole family sitting on the floor, working over a long frame. In some of these shacks they have a small room for visitors, with chairs and a table, and cheap prints of the Virgin on the walls. Under the house are kept usually a pig and a pony. One woman was very successful—she not only had waist patterns to show and to sell, but had a standing order from Marshall Field, in Chicago. We also visited a still more prosperous embroidery house, built of stucco, with a courtyard. These people were Spanish mestizos.
A visit to the cigarette factory to which we were taken by Mr. Legarda showed us one of the characteristic industries of the city and gave us an idea of the deftness and quickness of those who are employed in this work. The little women who pack the cigarettes can pick up a number of them and tell in a twinkle by the feeling just how many they hold, and the cigar wrappers work with greatest rapidity and sureness and make a perfect product. It was all very clean and fresh, with hundreds of employees in the large, airy rooms. A band played as we went through the building, and we had a generous luncheon and received innumerable presents from the managers.