A VILLAGE CLOCK.
"You never saw such a clock in America, or rather such a bell, for it was really a bell for sounding the hours, and not a timepiece.
"A log that had been hollowed out was suspended under a tree by one end, through which a lot of ropes were passed. This was the bell, and it was struck with a smaller log suspended near it; a watchman came every hour from the house of the priest, where there was a real clock that showed the time. Of course such a rude apparatus as this could not be exact, as the watchman is not very careful. Sometimes he makes the hours only fifteen minutes long, and when he has struck all of them, he goes home and has a comfortable rest. In this way he can make it noon before it is nine o'clock in the morning; in the middle of the day there is nothing to do, and he will stay away three or four hours without coming near the timepiece at all.
"Some children coming from school stopped to look at us while we were looking at the clock, and this made us ask about the schools among the natives. We were told that there were schools in all the villages; the school-master is paid by the government, and generally receives about two dollars a month, without board or lodging. If the village is a large one, he has three dollars and a half a month, and must pay for an assistant out of his own pocket; the assistant is usually a woman, who teaches the younger children, and her wages are one dollar a month, with a little present at the end of the year. The schools are under the supervision of the priests of the districts, and about half the children do not go to school at all. They teach reading and writing, and a little arithmetic; the Indians learn arithmetic very easily, and each scholar has a pile of shells before him, which he counts over and over again when he is learning the numerals. With the same shells he studies addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, by separating them into little heaps, and it is said to be very amusing to see the scholars at their tasks. They learn to write on a table covered with sand, and as fast as they have written an exercise, the sand is smoothed over for another. This odd sort of copy-book cannot be carried home at night; and, in fact, they don't have more than two or three books altogether. The reading-book is the "Christian Doctrine," so that the scholars get their religious education along with anything else they are learning. They remember their religion longer than they do their arithmetic, as they soon forget all else that they have learned, unless they go into employments requiring a knowledge of reading and writing.
A VOLCANO IN REPOSE.
"The next morning we went farther up into the interior, and came in sight of a mountain that looked like a great pile of ashes, and had a little wreath of smoke issuing from near the top. Our guide told us it was a volcano that had an eruption a few years before, but was now very quiet; what we said looked like ashes was the cone of the mountain covered with the volcanic ashes that had been thrown up. We wanted to climb the mountain, but there wasn't time; and, besides, it came on to rain, and we had to stop. The rain kept up through the night and all the next day, and we concluded to return to Manilla as soon as we could, and get ready to move on somewhere else. Perhaps you will want to know what we would have seen if we had gone across the island, and all through it.