,
of course, our little ship was stanch, until we asked the captain his
opinion. "If the engines hold out," he replied, "we may come through
all right. The engineer says that the old machine will probably blow up
now any time, and that the Filipinos have quit working and begun their
prayers." Generally a Filipino is the first to give up in a crisis;
but I have seen some that managed their canoes in a rough sea with
as much skill and coolness as an expert yachtsman could have shown. I
have to thank Madrono for the way in which he handled the small boat
that put out in a sea like glass and ran into a squall fifteen miles
out. All through the morning we had poled along over the crust of
coral bottom, where, in the transparent water, indigo fishes swam,
where purple starfish sprawled among the coral--coral of many colors
and in many forms. But as the wind came up and lashed the choppy
sea to whitecaps, as the huge waves swept along and seemed about to
knock the little _banca_ "off her feet," Madrono, standing on the
bamboo outrigger--a framework lashed together with the native cane,
the breaking of which would have immediately upset the boat--kept
her bow pointed for the shore, although a counter storm threatened
to blow us out to the deep sea.

So, after knocking around in _bancas_, picnicking with natives on the
chicken-bone and boiled rice; after a wild cruise in the _Thomas_,
where the captain and the crew, as drunk as lords, let the old rotten
vessel drift, while threatening with a gun the man that dared to meddle
with the steering gear; after a dreary six months in a provincial
town,--it seemed like coming into a new world to step aboard the clean
white transport, with electric-lights and an upholstered smoking-room.

A tourist party, mostly army officers, their wives and daughters,
"doing" the archipelago, made up the passenger list of the
transport. The officers, now they had settled satisfactorily the
question of superiority and "rank," made an agreeable company. There
was the Miss Bo Peep, in pink and white, who wore a dozen different
military pins, and would not look at any one unless he happened to
be "in the service." Like many of the army girls, she had no use
for the civilians or volunteers. Her mamma told with pride how,
at their last "at home," nobody under the rank of a major had been
present. One of the young lieutenants down at Zamboanga, when he
found she had not worn his pin, "retired to cry." But th