ate eggs with chickens in them. Eggs containing chickens were worth double the price of fresh eggs.
It was a great pleasure to return to our headquarters in the old monastery, where wholesome food and cool shower-baths could be had. The evenings at this domicile were always enjoyably spent, either at cards, reading, or music. Occasionally, Sebastian Gomez, an old Filipino, would bring his two granddaughters to the quarters; these were fairly good-looking señoritas and excellent musicians, the one playing the harp while the other played the accordion, accompanied by the old man with a guitar. Very often a deputy revenue collector, who spent considerable time with us, would join this trio with a violin, and these instruments combined rendered excellent music.
Occasionally my work consisted in planting signal-flags on points of vantage, where they could be seen through the telescope of a transit. It was incidental to one of these trips that Kane, of the Engineer Corps, and myself, while driving through a remote barrio, came in contact with the beautiful
Señorita Carmen Lemaire. In my travels I had encountered many odd freaks of nature, leaving me not overly susceptible to surprise; on this occasion, however, the unique circumstance attending the incident created little less than astonishment. The fact that to hear the Anglo-American tongue spoken by natives even in Manila was a rarity seldom enjoyed, made this event the more surprising.
We had left headquarters at Lolomboy in the early morning, with a pony hitched to a cartello containing the signal-flags, tent equipage, and rations for three days. Crossing the ferry at Bocaue, we struck a northerly route running west of Malolos, the old Filipino capital. We had covered a number of miles over a dusty road and through sweltering heat, when a quaint little barrio shaded by cocoa and palm trees on the banks of the Cianti River was reached. As the pony jogged along through the heart of the village, turning out occasionally for the little pickaninnies who played in the street, my eyes fell on something unusual for this section of the world,—an exceptionally
beautiful señorita, apparently a mestizo of European extraction, presiding over a fruit-stand in front of a large hacienda, from which exhaled the sweet odor of grated-cocoanut boiling in the syrup of the sugarcane.
“Kane, did you see that?” I asked. “Yes, some class; I wonder where that complexion came from,” he replied. “Let’s try and find out,” I said.
It was about the hour for the Filipino siesta and time for “tiffin”; so, drawing under the shade of a large mango tree, we tied and fed the pony, and I informed the engineer that I was going to buy some eggs. “Let me buy them,” said Kane, smilingly.
Approaching the hacienda, I saw standing under the eaves, with the grace of a Wanamaker cloak-model and the beauty of the allegorical Psyche, a Filipino señorita still in her ’teens, whose raven tresses would have been the envy of the “Sutherland sisters.” “Buenos dios, señorita,” I ventured. “Buenos dios,” she replied. “Tiene weibus?” (Tagalog for “Have you eggs?”). “Si, señor,” she replied. Kane, whose
knowledge of the dialects was limited, appearing on the scene, said, “How do you do?” “Quite well, thank you; how are you?” she said. “Better,” said Kane, smiling in expressive surprise. At first I thought it an apparition with a voice; to hear good old United States spoken in a feminine voice, after being inflicted for months with the pigeon English of Chinese and the smattering cackle of the natives was almost too good to be true.