t that distance looking
very much like Diana and her nymphs in the usual pictures.

Back in the main road, we stopped to rest at a point covered with
a sensitive plant so delicate that, on stepping on it anywhere, the
nervous thrill, if that is what it is, would run three or four feet
or more in all directions before dying down. From this point we turned
north, our way taking us through a broad open valley, past rice-fields
and between clumps of flowering guava bushes. As we neared Bambang,
where we were to spend the night, we were as before met by the local
notabilities on horseback; and breasting a rise, we saw our road down
in the plain in which this town lies, lined on both sides by all the
school-children of the place, dressed in their very best clothes, some
of them American fashion with shoes and stockings and looking mighty
uncomfortable in consequence. Nearly everyone had a flag. Riding into
the town, we found the _plaza_ crowded with men and women, dressed
mostly in white, and what with the flags, the church-bells clanging
with all their might, the crowd, and the children trooping in, our
cavalcade made a triumphant entrance.

We dismounted at the _presidente's_, where muscatel and cocoanut milk
were given us. A little muscatel goes a long way, but this is not true
of the milk when one's tongue is hanging out from riding in the sun,
and there are only two or three cocoanuts. Filipinos apparently are
not fond of this drink, and we nearly always had to send out and
get more. No sooner were we in the house than addresses began, one
of these being in Ilokano. The native language of Bambang, however,
is the Isanay, spoken elsewhere only at Aritao and Dupax, a dying
tongue, doomed to early extinction.

Bambang, like nearly all the other Nueva Vizcaya towns we had seen
or were to see, shows signs of decadence. It has a good church and
_convento_, a great _plaza_, and is surrounded by a fertile country,
but something is missing. After dinner, I went over and called on
the padre, one of the Belgians, whom we had met the day before. He
informed me that Bambang had many Protestants, which he explained by
the sharp rivalry between the _Aglipayanos_, or members of the "native"
church, headed by the secessionist Aglipay, and the Catholics. To
avoid the issues raised by this rivalry, many natives would appear
to have abandoned the errors of Rome (or of _Aglipayanismo_, as the
case may be) for those of the Reformation.