turpentine flavor. It grows on a tree, found almost everywhere in Luzon, and also in other parts of the Philippines. A few cents pays for all the fruit we can eat, and we walk on, peeling bananas and munching them as

we go.

Among the vegetables are lettuce, cabbage, sweet potatoes, onions, the green shoots of the bamboo, as well as many things strange to our eyes. One of the woman peddlers picks up a handful of the white roots she is selling, and asks us to buy. We each take a root and bite into it, but spit it out quickly. It is as hot as fire, our tongues and lips smart as though they were poisoned, and we take quick bites of banana to cool them. This root is ginger. It grows wild in the woods, and is used by the natives to make a weak tea and a fish sauce.

She

What are the queer nuts in that tray on the other side of the ginger? They look like green butternuts. There is a little pile of lime near them, with palm leaves and tobacco beside it. See that old woman who has come up. She picks up a nut and bites into it. As she opens her mouth, we notice her gums are apparently bleeding. Her tongue is red, and her teeth seem to drip blood. has a quid inside her left cheek which she chews now and then during her talk with the root seller. She is chewing the betel, a nut like those on the tray. The betel nut is the fruit of the areca palm. It is cut up and mixed with lime and tobacco, and thus chewed, making the saliva the color of blood. The habit is common not only throughout the Philippine Islands, but also in Siam, Burmah, and other parts of the world. It has much the same effect as tobacco upon those who use it.

25. A TRIP THROUGH THE COUNTRY RICE, SUGAR, AND TOBACCO

WE

E leave Manila this morning to see something of the Filipinos on their farms, and in their towns and villages. Our journey will last several weeks, for Luzon is, with the exception of the wild land of Mindanao, by far the largest of the Philippines. It has more than half of their entire population, and is the best developed and the wealthiest of all. It has many resources, and we shall see some of the chief industries of the archipelago during the journey.

How

Our first trip is through the rich valley which runs from Manila northward to the Gulf of Lingayen (lēn-gä-yān'). This valley is more than one hundred miles long, and in places fifty miles wide. The oldest railroad of the Philippines runs through it, and we go on the cars. delightful it is! We have shot out of the city and are speeding along over a plain bordered on each side by magnificent mountains as blue as the Alleghanies in midsummer. The car windows are open, and the fresh air blows through. On each side of the track are vast fields of rice, dotted here and there with groves of bananas, patches of Indian corn, or the pale green of little sugar plantations. Now we pass a clump of tall, feathery bamboos, and now a road or stream lined with these beautiful trees.

We can see but few houses from the car windows, although some of the towns are made up of a single street several miles long. The houses are hid by the bamboos

and other trees which shade them. There are no buildings in the fields. Most of the people live in villages scattered along the roads, as in many countries of Europe. Some of them walk several miles to their work every day.

There is but little stock. We see neither cows nor sheep. The ponies of Luzon are raised in other sections, and the only animals visible are the carabaos, and now and then an ugly black pig. The carabaos are everywhere. They drag farm carts with solid wooden wheels a yard in diameter, and haul sleds where the ground is so soft that carts can not be used. We see them in the mud of the rice fields, going along, with their heads down, drawing rude one-handled plows. In many places they are ridden by men or children; and still stranger they are often ridden by birds. Every other buffalo we see in the fields has a

OUR COLONIES II

bird on his back. There is one now quietly feeding with a great white crane roosting on him. Farther on is another, upon which stands a crow. Each bird is picking at its buffalo, but the buffalo understands it. He knows that the birds are good flycatchers, and that they live on the insects that feed upon him.

Look again at the fields. Those devoted to rice are surrounded by low, mud walls upon which green grass and wild flowers are growing. The walls are to keep in the water with which the rice is flooded, and they also form paths through the fields. You can see people walking upon them, and carabaos ridden by children going to or coming from pasture.

In some places the rice is still green, but more often it is of a rich golden color with well-headed stalks. That

rice is ready for harvest. The seeds from which it came were planted in beds months ago, and the little sprouts were set out one at a time in the mud, so that the field, when finished, looked like one of our wheat fields in the spring. Then the rainy season came on and gave the land a good soaking. It covered the sprouts with water, and they grew. The fields now look much like our oats or wheat when ready for harvest; they are fit for cutting; after that the rice must be thrashed and hulled. Rice is the chief food crop of the Philippines, and we shall see the people working in it almost everywhere during our travels. There is a field where they are harvesting now. See those big-hatted women whose red skirts show out above the yellow grain! Each has a little knife in her hand; she is cutting the rice stalk by stalk, and binding it up in fat sheaves not bigger than a good-sized bouquet. Farther on is a field in which the sheaves are shocked up, and next to it one where men are thrashing. A blindfolded carabao is walking over the straw to tread the rice out. Sometimes men and women jump up and down upon the rice to thrash it, and sometimes the grains are pulled from the stalk through sawlike machines. After this the hulls must be pounded off with hard wooden pestles in a mortar made of a block of tough wood. Nearly every farmer has such a mortar, and one of the daily chores of the boys and girls of the family is to pound the rice out. After being hulled, the grain is winnowed by throwing it up in the air so that the chaff blows away.

Farther up the valley we come into a region where the soil is better fitted for sugar. The country seems flooded with a sea of pale green which rises and falls in waves