still fatter shoulders. Unlike other Moro women,
our hostess's hair was neatly arranged, her teeth were beautifully
white, and her costume, which consisted of a nondescript skirt and
loose dressing sacque, much affected by Spanish women throughout the
islands, was daintily clean.

The other occupants of the big room were Moro--unadulterated
Moro--fifty or sixty of them, all in gala dress, the women squatted
on the floor, the men leaning against the side of the house, and all
staring with unabashed interest in our direction, while we stared
back at them quite as interested.

Every man there was armed with at least a _barong_ stuck into his broad
sash, and many of them boasted a _kris_ and _campilan_ as well, while
the brilliant colours of their costumes, and the still more gaudy
_sarongs_ of the women, made them resemble a gathering of strange
tropic birds, our European apparel looking singularly dull and sober
beside their scarlets, greens, and purples. Over this strange scene
flickered the dim light of cocoanut-oil lamps, and outside a shower
beat softly against the trees, and the moon looked down at us whitely
from a cloudy sky.

Presently a weird noise broke in upon our conversation. The orchestra
had begun to play. Now, Moro music is strangely unrhythmical to
European ears, consisting as it does of a monotonous reiteration of
sound, even a supposed change of air being almost imperceptible to
one unaccustomed to the barbarous lack of tone. The Moro piano is a
wooden frame, shaped like the runners of a child's sled, on which are
balanced small kettle-drums by means of cords and sticks. These more
nearly resemble pots for the kitchen range than musical instruments,
but each is roughly tuned, forming the eight notes of the scale. Women,
crouching on the ground before this instrument, beat out of it a
wailing sound with shaped sticks, while on larger kettle-drums, hung
by ropes from a wooden railing at one side, two men accompanied the
"piano," an old woman in the background drumming out an independent
air of her own on an empty tin pan.

Meanwhile the dancing had begun, or rather the posturing of the body,
for the feet and legs are used but little in the Moro dances, which
consist principally of moving the body and arms rhythmically and to
music, the wrists always leading gracefully.

Among the women this attitudinizing was very pretty, the bangles
tinkling on their round arms, while the _sarong_ half-revealed,