Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/579

Rh doesn't draw more than fifteen feet, so she pokes in through the shipping, enters the narrow Pasig River, which slouches down from somewhere up country, dividing Manila in two, and ties up at the quay just beneath that grim old fort now known as the Black Hole.

It is stifling at the custom house, and, with the proper mixture, you could fry griddle cakes on the steaming sheet-iron roofs that sizzle in the sun. Shaggy goats are nosing around for lumps of wet sugar dropped from sacks that are being unloaded from some provincial steamer, and big carabou, or water oxen, attached to two-wheeled dray carts, are gasping for water in the vertical sun. The officials look cool enough in bent-wood rocking-chairs, but they make you boil within as their orderlies upset your trunk in the search for contraband Mexican dollars. And for many years that custom house has brought to a boil the anger of the foreign business houses. For whether its officials have extracted champagne from cases imported, and emptied many good bottles in the effort to make sure the liquid was not cologne, or have fined ship captains one hundred dollars for every piece of their cargo exceeding or falling short of the amount called for by the manifest, it has long been the foe to all business enterprise.

From the customs you get into a noisy carriage built for a much lower studded person than yourself, and behind two lean little ponies rattle up to the English Club, just as most of its members are sitting down to the noon tiffin or hearty breakfast. Conversation stops, and you dodge the swinging punkah, to hear, in stage whispers, some one asking, "Who's the new man?" For the first few days nobody lets you pay for anything; but after the colony have found out what in the dickens you have come to Manila for, they take you more for granted. After that, if you want to be invited out to dine with the gentler element, you must call on the half-dozen ladies of the settlement, and if they ever want to see your face again, they must ask you to dinner within a fortnight.

Left to your own resources, you order eighteen white cloth suits, for two dollars apiece, at the tailor's, and make arrangements to carry enough coin for car fares. No one carries more—for those white suits aren't built that way. Since the currency is all heavy metal, the "chit" system is in full force; and go where you like, buy what you will, the dealer wants nothing in payment but a signed I.O.U. When the new month comes in, all the collectors come in with it, bringing you your "chits," as they are called. At such times the office is like a money changer's, and the dark-skinned, hollow-cheeked natives, who take your Mexicans and give up your I.O.U.'s, vie with each other in biting the silver to detect counterfeits.