The Spanish pastor and his wife, also teachers in day school, night school, Sunday school, are no less marvels of industry. The multiplication table, lustily intoned to the tramp of marching feet, called us into a class-room where the older girls were gathered for lessons in reading and writing, arithmetic and geography, sewing and embroidery. The delicate little lady who presides over this lively kingdom may be seen on Sunday, seated at the melodeon, leading the chapel music--an exquisite picture of a Spanish señora, with the lace mantilla crowning the black hair and gracefully falling to the slender shoulders. We had heard her give an address on foreign soil, before an audience of a hundred strangers, speaking with an irresistible fervor of appeal, and no less charming was she at the head of her own table, the soul of vivacious and winsome hospitality.
As for the pastor himself, he carries the administrative burdens of church and school, teaches the larger boys morning and afternoon, and the men in the evening, preaches once on Thursday and twice on Sunday, and slips in between these stated tasks all the innumerable incidental duties of a missionary pastorate. And yet this man of many labors is not only Spanish, but Philippine. His childhood was passed at Cavite, the home of his father, a Spanish officer, who had chosen his bride from a native family. The boy was put to school with the friars at Manila, where, rather to the disgust of the soldier-father, he formed the desire to enter the brotherhood. He was not blind--what students are?--to the blemishes of his teachers. He had often stood by with the other lads and shouted with laughter to see a group of friars, their cassocks well girded up, drive a pig into their shallow pond and stab the plunging creature there, that it might be counted "fish" and serve them for dinner on Friday. But his faith in the order held firm, and, when his novitiate was well advanced, he was sent to Madrid for the final ceremonies. Here, by chance, he dropped into a Protestant service, and after several years of examination and indecision, chose the thorny road.
All his wearing occupations do not dull that fine sense of courtesy inherent in a Spanish gentleman. The sun itself had hardly risen when we departed from San Sebastian, yet we found Don Angel at the station, muffled in the inevitable Spanish _capa_, to say good-by once more and assure us that, come what might, we had always "a house and a friend in Spain." We laid down the local journal, hard reading that it was with its denunciations of "the inhuman barbarities of the North Americans toward the Filipinos," and ventured to ask for his own view of the matter.