sula. The Filipinos are of the varied
styles that adorn Africans and the Asiatics. They are gay in colors
and curious in the adjustment of stuffs, from the flimsy jackets to
the fantastic skirts. The first essential in the dress of a Filipino
is a jacket cut low, the decolette feature being obscured to some
extent by pulling out one shoulder and covering the other, taking
the chances of the lines that mark the concealment and disclosure
of breast and back. There is no expression of immodesty. The woman
of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes
are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising
the disappointed dreams of long ago. Profounder grief than is read
in the faces of bronze and copper no mourning artist has wrought nor
gloomy poet written. Below the jacket, the everlasting blazer, is a
liberal width of cloth tightly drawn about the loins, stomach and hips,
making no mistake in revelations of the original outline drawings, or
the flexibilities which the activities display. There are two skirts,
an outer one that opens in front, showing the tunic, which is of a
color likely to be gaudy and showing strangely with the outer one. The
feet are exposed, and if not bare, clothed only in clumsy slippers
with toe pieces, and neither heels nor uppers. Women carry burdens on
their heads, and walk erect and posed as if for snap photographs. The
young girls are fond of long hair, black as cannel coal, and streaming
in a startling cataract to the hips. It seems that the crop of hair
is unusually large, and it shines with vitality, as the breeze lifts
it in the sunshine. The Philippine boys are still more lightly clad
than the girls, who have an eye to queer combinations of colors, and
the revelation of the lines that distinguish the female form without
flagrant disclosure. There is much Philippine dressing that may under
all the surroundings be called modest, and the prevalent expression
of the Filipino is that of fixed but bewildered grief. The males are
rather careless, and display unstinted the drawings of legs, that are
copper-colored and more uniform in tint than symmetry. Two or three
rags do a surprisingly extensive service, and all the breezes cause
the fluttering of fantastic but scanty raiment. It is a comfort to
return to a country where people wear clothing not as a flimsy and
inadequate disguise. What will be the influence of our armies bent to
the tropics, upon the dress