th their teeth, they disappear beyond
the hill. Now they have reached a wonderful country, where the monkeys
and the parrots chatter in the trees. They can set traps for little
parrots with a net of fine thread fastened to the branches. Only
a little further on is a small mountain _barrio_, where naked,
lazy men lie in the sun all day, and the women weave bright-colored
blankets on their looms. Returning with their handkerchiefs tied
full of eggs, the boys reach home about sundown. The thought of
being late to supper never worries them; the Filipino is notoriously
unpunctual at meals. The boys will cook their own rice, and spread
out the sleeping-mat wherever the sunset finds them. One shelter is
as good as another, and they just as often sleep away from home as
in their own beds. Their parents never worry about the children, for
they know that, like Bo-peep's sheep, they will come back some time,
and it doesn't make much difference when.

Early in April the rice-fields are flooded by the irrigation ditches
that the river or the mountain streams have filled with water. A plow
made of the notch of a tree is used to break the soil. A carabao
is used for this work, as it is impossible to mire him even in the
deepest mud. The boys and girls, together with the men and women,
wearing enormous sun-hats--in the crown of which there is a place for
cigarettes and matches--and with bared legs, work in the steaming
fields throughout the planting season. As the rice grows taller,
the crows are frightened away by strings of flags manipulated from
a station in the center of the paddy. Scarecrows are built whenever
there are any clothes to spare; but as the Filipino even utilizes
rags, the scarecrow often has to go in shocking _negligee_. After the
harvest season, when the entire village reaps the rice with bolos,
the dry field is given over to the ponies, and the carabaos, and the
white storks, who never desert their burly friend, the carabao, but
often are seen perching on his back. The work of husking and pounding
the crop then occupies the village.

If you should be invited in to dinner by a Filipino family, you would
expect to eat boiled rice and chicken. They would place a cuspidor on
one side of your chair to catch the chicken bones, which you would
spit out from your mouth. The food would be cooked in dishes placed
on stones over an open fire. The cook and the _muchachos_ never wash
their hands. They wash the dishes only by p