We have had one or two very fine days again lately, and have been for one or two drives, but some very blood-thirsty road-mending has been going on, to prepare the town for the critical eyes of the Taft party, who are to arrive here from Manila on the 14th or 15th of next month. This road-mending is done by hauling the volcanic gravel out of the river beds, and dumping it in huge piles along the middle of the roads, and as the thoroughfares are not lighted, the result is a wild steeplechase with one wheel in the air. Sometimes fellows come along and spread the gravel out, but more generally it just spreads itself. It makes very soft roads, which the heavy carabao-carts plough up at once.
One of the last drives we took was to visit the foreign cemetery, which is on the outskirts of the town, on a road running parallel to the beach. We got out of the trap at a tall wooden gate, which an old man opened to us, and walked up a short avenue of flowering bushes and palms. The graves stood on a grassy plot, with bushes growing about it, laden with large red or yellow blossoms, and crossed at right angles by sandy paths bordered with tiles. They were not ordinary graves, like those one sees at home, for each one was a sort of small brick tunnel some feet from the ground, and closed by a cemented tablet. There were names of some English people on one or two of them, and one had just been opened to send the bones of the occupant back to his native land. The man had been dead twenty-five years, and it seemed to me hardly worth while to disturb him.
A little behind the main row of tombs we came on a Jewish grave—a big marble sarcophagus—with an iron rail round it and inscriptions in Hebrew on the flat top. The marble was native to this country, I have no doubt, as there is plenty of it in the Philippines; in fact some of the small islands are known to be of solid marble, but it does not pay to work them—did I not tell you this before, though?
Mr B—— came to call this afternoon, and was very indignant about local justice, as it appears that one of his Filipino clerks was impudent to a white man in his firm, whereupon the white man naturally struck the Filipino as any ordinary man of grit strikes a man who is rude to him. However, the cur Filipino went off to the police and lodged a complaint. The white man was had up, and has been heavily fined for “assaulting” the Filipino, and Mr B—— says:
“What on earth are you to do with impertinent natives if you don’t hit them? They don’t care a straw if you dismiss them, and take not the least notice of reproof.”
But I think there is right on both sides, for the way some of the white men hit their servants about is brutal and foolish. I said something to this effect, whereupon Mr B—— said, very much surprised:
“Why, doesn’t your husband have to kick your fellows about?”
And he was quite incredulous when I assured him that C—— had never dreamed of such a thing except once, when our first cook had muttered impertinences, and been kicked out on to the Azotea for his rudeness.
“But they are such stupid fools,” argued Mr B——.