A DOG MARKET AMONG THE IGGOROTEES OF THE PHILIPPINES.
The Japanese Captain bowed continuously and smiled; sucking in his breath with a characteristic national custom; the same sound they made as they eat fried eggs in a Japanese dining car; a sound similar to the old-fashioned but now obsolete method of drinking coffee from a saucer.
"There is just one request however that we will have to make of you, while you are here with us in the hotel," continued the American hotel manager.
"And what is that may I ask?" inquired the Japanese Captain, still bowing and sucking in air through his teeth.
"That you do not climb around in the trees!"
The Japanese officers did not see the joke and did not even smile but the Americans in the Far East have laughed over it for years.
Which reminds one of the night on the Sambas River when a hundred little monkeys were silhouetted against a crimson sunset.
Red, brown, yellow, golden, blue orchids flashed in the sunlight; and flowers of every hue under God's blue skies made brilliant the river banks. At times the ship went so close that I could reach out and grab a limb of a tree, much to the indignation of the monkeys who chattered at me as if I had stolen something. Now and then a big lazy alligator slid into the water from the muddy banks as the wave-wash from our propeller frightened him.
Coming back down the Sambas River, along its winding, beautiful way we sat one evening and watched a crimson sunset from the deck of the ship. At one point in the river there was a row of dead, bare trees. There were no leaves on the branches—only monkeys: big red monkeys, which they call "Beroks," and little gray fellows, which they call "Wahwahs." These monkeys were strikingly silhouetted against the crimson sunset in strange tropical fashion. From the tips of those dead trees down to the lowest branches dozens of monkeys stood like sentinels, or romped like children, or chattered like magpies. Their long curling tails silhouetted below the branches against the light of evening.
* * * * * *