ult an achievement it may seem. Incapable of any new idea and
satisfied with his _modus vivendi_, he was ever ready to gratify
the desires of the last official of the fifth class in every one of
the offices, to make presents of hams, capons, turkeys, and Chinese
fruits at all seasons of the year. If he heard any one speak ill of
the natives, he, who did not consider himself as such, would join in
the chorus and speak worse of them; if any one aspersed the Chinese or
Spanish mestizos, he would do the same, perhaps because he considered
himself become a full-blooded Iberian. He was ever first to talk in
favor of any new imposition of taxes, or special assessment, especially
when he smelled a contract or a farming assignment behind it. He always
had an orchestra ready for congratulating and serenading the governors,
judges, and other officials on their name-days and birthdays, at the
birth or death of a relative, and in fact at every variation from the
usual monotony. For such occasions he would secure laudatory poems
and hymns in which were celebrated "the kind and loving governor,"
"the brave and courageous judge for whom there awaits in heaven the
palm of the just," with many other things of the same kind.

He was the president of the rich guild of mestizos in spite of
the protests of many of them, who did not regard him as one of
themselves. In the two years that he held this office he wore out ten
frock coats, an equal number of high hats, and half a dozen canes. The
frock coat and the high hat were in evidence at the Ayuntamiento,
in the governor-general's palace, and at military headquarters; the
high hat and the frock coat might have been noticed in the cockpit,
in the market, in the processions, in the Chinese shops, and under the
hat and within the coat might have been seen the perspiring Capitan
Tiago, waving his tasseled cane, directing, arranging, and throwing
everything into disorder with marvelous activity and a gravity even
more marvelous.

So the authorities saw in him a safe man, gifted with the best of
dispositions, peaceful, tractable, and obsequious, who read no books
or newspapers from Spain, although he spoke Spanish well. Indeed,
they rather looked upon him with the feeling with which a poor student
contemplates the worn-out heel of his old shoe, twisted by his manner
of walking. In his case there was truth in both the Christian and
profane proverbs _beati pauperes spiritu_ and _beati possidentes_,