Children’s Games—How Moonlight Nights Are Enjoyed—The Popularity of Baseball Among the Filipinos—My Domestics Play the Game—The Difficulty of Putting Out Fires—Need of Water-Storage for the Dry Season—Apathy of the Public at Fires—Examples Showing the Loyalty and Devotion of Servants When Fires Occur.
Filipino children are not so active as the children of our own race, and their games incline to the sedentary order. Like their elders, they gamble; and like all children, the world over, they have a certain routine in which games succeed one another. At one season in the year the youngsters are absorbed in what must be a second cousin to “craps.” Every child has some sort of tin can filled with small spotted seashells. They throw these like dice; they slap their hands together with the raking gesture of the crap-player, and utter ejaculations in which numeral adjectives predominate, and which must be similar to “lucky six” and kindred expressions.
Following the crap game there is usually a season of devotion to a kind of solitaire which is played with shells on a circular board, scooped out into a series of little cup-like depressions. They will amuse themselves with this for hours at a time. The shells are moved from cup to cup, and other shells are thrown like dice to determine how the shells are to progress.
The commonest form of child gambling, however, is that of pitching coppers on the head and tail plan. You may see twenty or more games of this sort at any time around a primary school. Sometimes the game ends in a fight. Sometimes the biggest urchin gathers up everything in sight and escapes on the ringing of the bell, leaving his howling victims behind.
Not unnaturally, in consideration of the heat, there is comparatively little enthusiasm for rough sport. The only very active play in which little boys and girls engage, is leap frog, which differs slightly from the game in our own country.
Two children sit upon the ground and clasp their right hands. A leader starts out, clears this barrier, and all the rest of the players follow. Then one of the sitting children clasps his unoccupied left hand upon the upraised thumb of his companion, thus raising the height of the barrier by the width of the palm. The line starts again and all jump this. Then the second sitter adds his palm and thumb to the barrier, and the line of players attack this. It is more than likely that some one will fail to clear this last barrier, and the one who does so squats down, pressing close to the other two, and puts in his grimy little paw and thumb. So they continue to raise the height of the barrier till, at last, nobody can jump it.
When they play drop the handkerchief, Filipino children squat upon their heels in a circle instead of standing. They have also the familiar “King William was King James’s Son”; I do not know whether the words in the vernacular which they use are the equivalent of ours or not. The air, at least, is the one with which we are all familiar.
They have one more game which seems to be something like our hop-scotch but more complicated. The diagram, which is roughly scratched out on the ground, is quite an extensive one. The player is blindfolded, and hops about, kicking at his bit of stone and placing it in accordance with some mysterious rule which I have vainly sought to acquire. The children play this in the cool, long-shadowed afternoons, when they have returned from school, have doffed their white canvas shoes and short socks, and have reverted to the single slip of the country.
Sunset over Manila Bay