These two men, the only survivors of the large passenger-list of the Gravina, came into our office yesterday, and, after giving a graphic description of the catastrophe, easily got us to loosen our purse-strings. The accident is the worst that has occurred for many a day, and there is a gloom over the whole city. The newspapers came out with black borders, and many families are bereaved.
The more I see of these native servants, the more I appreciate that they are great fabricators and excuse-makers. Your boy, for example, every now and then wants an advance of five or ten dollars on his salary. His father has just died, he tells you, and he needs the money to pay for the saying of a mass for the repose of his soul. Then comes another boy, who says that by his sister's marrying somebody or other his aunt has become his grandmother, and he wants cinco pesos, to buy her a present of a fighting-cock or something else. This matter of relationship here in the Philippines is a most delicate one to keep control of, and in the matter of deaths, births, and marriages among your servants' relations it is very essential that you keep an accurate list of the family tree, so that you may check up any tendency on their part to kill off their fathers and mothers more than twice or three times during the year for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. As an example of this, my own boy actually had the cheek to ask me for the loan of a dozen dollars to arrange for the repose of the soul of one of his relatives I had once before assisted him to bury.
I seem to have gone a long way in my chronicles without speaking much of the native "ladies" in Manila, and I owe them an apology. But one of them the other day so swished her long pink calico train in front of a pony that was cantering up to the club with a carromata in which two of us were seated, that we were dumped out into a muddy rice-field by the wayside. So the apology should be mutual. The costumes worn by the women are far from simple and are made up of that brilliant skirt with long train that is swished around and tucked into the belt in front, the short white waist that, at times divorced from the skirt below, has huge flaring sleeves of piña fibre which show the arms, and the costly piña handkerchief which, folded on the diagonal, encircles the neck. They wear no hats, often go without stockings, and invariably walk as if they were carrying a pail of water on their heads. They generally chew betelnuts, which color the mouth an ugly red, smoke cigars, and put so much cocoanut-oil on their straight, black hair that it is not pleasant to get to leeward of them in an open tram-car. Otherwise they are generally the mothers of many children and often play well on the harp.