r's combs until fully angered,
when they were put into the ring a short distance apart, and while
each owner held the tail feathers of his bird, the cocks made futile
efforts to reach each other, giving vent the while to derisive crowing.

The audience, after watching this performance a moment or two,
began making their bets, both individually and through the agency
of the "farmer," who, standing in the centre of the ring, cried out
chaffingly in Visayan to faint-hearted gamesters. Then circles were
drawn on the earthen floor of the pit, and the money put up on each
cock deposited in one or the other of these rings. At the end of the
fight some one appointed cried out the name of the victorious bird,
and the winners swarmed down into the pit where they collected their
money and the original stakes. There is never any cheating at such
affairs, a sort of bolo morality existing among the natives, and all
is as methodical and well-behaved as the proverbial Sabbath school.

It was the first cock-fight most of us cable-ship people had ever seen,
and it was hard to understand the wild enthusiasm of the natives when,
after unsheathing the steel gaffs on the roosters' legs, the birds
were allowed to make their preliminary dash at one another. For a
moment they walked around the ring with an excessively polite air, each
keeping a wary lookout on his antagonist, but frigidly impersonal and
courteous. One might almost fancy them shaking hands before the combat
should begin, so ceremonious was their attitude. Then there would come
a simultaneous onslaught of feathered fury. Again and again they flew
at one another, while the volatile audience called out excitedly in
Spanish, "The black wins--No, the speckled one's ahead. Holy Virgin,
give strength to the black!" In a very few moments one cock is either
dead, or perhaps turned coward before the cruel gaff of his opponent,
and victor and vanquished leave the arena to new combatants, while
the clink of coin changing hands is heard throughout the cockpit.

The first few fights we thought rather tame, and I, personally, had
to assure myself over and over as the bloody contestants were removed
from the scene of action, that such a death was no more painful and
certainly far less ignominious than when chicken stewed or _a la
Maryland_ was to be the ultimate result of the fowl's demise.

There was one little game-cock, however, who enthused even the most
dispassionate among us. He was sm