Soon the slender caballeros got to look fatter in the face, and the double chins of their ladies grew doubler every moment. Knives, forks, and spoons were all going at once, and talk was suspended. But the room presented a pretty sight, with its fourscore couples sitting around beneath the swaying punkahs, and the soft warm light made beauties out of many ordinary-looking persons.
After everybody was satisfied, dancing was resumed in the big front rooms on the river, and the gayety went on; but the heavy supper made many of the foreign guests grow dull, and the cool hours of early morning saw everyone depart, carrying with them or in them food enough for many days.
Thus ended the great ball given to balance the debt of hospitality owed by the bachelors to their married friends, and now will come the committee’s collectors for money to pay the piper.
January 31st.
Manila has been quite outdoing herself lately, and the gayeties have been numerous. The opening of the Royal Exposition of the Philippines took place last week, and was quite as elaborate as the name itself.
The Exposition buildings were grouped along the raised ground filled in on the paddy-fields, by the side of the broad avenue that divides our suburb of Malate from that of Ermita, and runs straight back inland from the sea. The architecture is good, the buildings numerous, and with grounds tastefully decorated with plants and fountains, it is, in a way, like a pocket edition of the Chicago Exposition.
Everybody in town was invited to attend the opening ceremonies by a gorgeously gotten-up invitation, and interesting catalogues of the purpose of the exhibition and its exhibits were issued in both Spanish and English. To be sure, the language in the catalogue translated from the Spanish was often ridiculous, and announcements were made of such exhibits as “Collections of living animals of laboring class,” and “tabulated prices of transport terrestrial and submarine.” But all of the élite of Manila were on hand at the ceremonies, from the Archbishop and Governor-General down to my coachman’s wife, and bands played, flags waved in the fresh breeze, tongues wagged, guns fired, and whistles blew. General Blanco opened the fair with a well-worded speech on the importance of the Philippines, of the debt that the inhabitants owed to the protection of the mother-country, and of the great future predestined for the Archipelago. And just as the speaker had finished and the closing hours of the day arrived, the new electric lights were turned on for the first time. Then all Manila, hitherto illuminated by the dull and dangerous petroleum lamps, shone forth under the radiance of several hundred arc-lights and a couple of thousand incandescent ones.
The improvement is tremendous, and the streets, which have always been dim from an excess of real tropical, visible, feelable, darkness, are now respectably illuminated.
The exposition was opened on the name-day of the little King of Spain, and every house in town was requested, if not ordered, to hang out some sort of a flag or decoration. It was said that a fine of $5 would be charged to those who did not garb their shanties in colors of some sort, and all the natives were particular to obey the law. It was indeed instructive, if not pathetic, to see shawls, colored handkerchiefs, red table-cloths, carpets, and even sofa-cushions, hanging out of windows, or on poles from poverty-stricken little nipa huts, and any article with red or yellow in it seemed good enough to answer the purpose. We, in turn, were also officially requested to show our colors, and I hung out two bath-wraps from our front window, articles which I had picked up on the recent excursion to Mindanao, and which the wild savages there wear down to the river when they go to wash clothes or themselves. But they likewise had enough red and yellow in their composition to fill the bill, and, together with five pieces of red flannel from my photographic dark-room, our windows showed a most prepossessing appearance.
