Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/583

Rh Living is dirt cheap—if you are not fond of tinned peas and asparagus, that come from France and Germany. Our cook got forty cents per diem to supply our table with an entire dinner for four people, and for five cents extra he would decorate the cloth with orchids and put peas in the soup. As a servant the native is satisfactory if you have enough of him. He takes bossing well, and you can punch his head if things go wrong. In fact, he rather expects it than otherwise, and does not put his arms akimbo and march out of the house when you mildly suggest that the quality of ants in the cake was not up to standard. For ants are everywhere; and unless the legs of your dining-table and cook-stove stand in cups of kerosene, the ants will be apt to eat the dinner before you do. For wages these boys—and they are called boys till they die—get some four dollars a month; and on this salary my own servant paid ten per cent. to the government, supported a wife and two children, bought all his own food, and ran a fighting cock. I don't know how much he stole, but he used sometimes to call on me for an advance, saying that he needed funds to bury some relative. At first I was touched at his loss, but, later on, when he tried to bury his mother twice over, I found it necessary to keep a record of the family tree in order not to be led into paying an advance on the cost of two funerals for the same person.

Spain has long had her hands full with the Philippines, although it has been her asylum for the reception of officials with empty pockets and friars of empty morals. The wilder tribes of the interior have never recognized the rule of any one, and not thirty miles from the moats of Old Manila are races of dwarfs who care not or know not of Spain's existence. For years the Spanish troops have tried to battle the tribes on Mindanao Island into submission, but without success. Peaceful natives have been taxed, and if taxes haven't been paid, they have been drafted

into service for the campaign in that great fever-stricken graveyard to the south. The prisons of Manila have emptied their inmates into troop ships, and the ships have discharged their human cargoes on to that disputed soil. If the convicts were killed in assaulting the rude forts of the wild men, well and good; if the untrained boys who were drafted into service were cut to pieces, it was not of great import. If the native troops were touched, it began to look serious; but if the Spanish line began to waver, it was time to retreat.

The end of it all came in the beginning of 1896, when rebellion broke out and Spain had to face the brotherhood of the Katipunan. An attempt was made to seize Manila while the troops were at the south, but the leader was lacking, and the plot failed. But the uprising had come. Spain's soldiers were recalled, suspects were seized, guards increased, and martial law proclaimed. Sixty out of the first hundred prisoners shut into that old dungeon whose walls cast dark shadows on the Pasig just above the "Esmeralda's" berth, were in one night smothered by the act of the officer on guard, who, because it rained, shut the trap-door that