I

WAS entertaining Troil at the Elks' Club in Manila.

The setting sun made magic over the great bulk of the Army and Navy Club next door, touched with its flattering brush the modern hotel across the "made ground" with which we have ruined the Luneta, powdered the curving sweep of beach that stretches from the city to the Polo Club. Clubs everywhere. The trail of the American, who has to sleep in a hotel with brass beds and bathe in a tub with running water and foregather at clubs.

We sat on the portico, waiting for the

-Chinese Moral Maxims.

late dinner-hour of Manila, and looked out across the bay in an effort to forget the improvements which are effacing the marks of history. I was speaking of these things and in a way apologizing to Troil for the havoc that my flag had brought to beauty. For Troil lives in the Philippines. One of those Englishmen who seem to be living in every outpost of the world.

But Troil appeared to think that we had not done enough out there; that we had failed, in some way, to understand something that he was failing to convey to me. He talked vaguely, and my thoughts on the subject were shadowy; we were unable to find a mental focus. I had the feeling, throughout the entire

evening, that I was in the dark and that Troil was only half-way out of the dark -in a sort of twilight stage of seeing.

We were discussing the meeting-ground of the races; for that, more than Hongkong even, Manila has come to be. Troil was saying:

"The only way in which a Caucasian can get at an Oriental is to see him in conjunction with a white man and judge by what he does. We can't judge what he thinks, for we can't get inside his headever!"

"But that only holds good here, where the whites have been in possession for so many centuries. We'd do better to study him in his own habitat," I advanced. "The Japanese in his islands-the Chinaman in Peking-say?"

"No," answered Troil. "No. The Japanese in Tokio, the Chinaman in Peking-those are cogs of government. Governments do not show people as they are; they show people as they would like to be considered to be. We can't go into their heads there, any more than we can here. I've been in the East a long time, Winslow; and I tell you that we can never get beneath the skin of an Asian. Contact, not psychology: that's what we must work on. And we only get the contact in a city like this, where we are all thrown together. Contact!"

"There's bound to be a link," I said. "Humanity is a chain. I have it-Eurasians! There's our link, between a superior yellow race and the whites!"

I had been amused on meeting Troil the week previous to note that he, an exile of many years, still persisted in his use of the monocle. But this evening it struck me that even through the little glass his eye was strange. He was looking too fixedly at nothing.

He nodded abstractedly. "They are a link, but a weak link because they hate both sides. They understand the Chinese-yes; but they loathe them because they are ashamed of their one-half Chinese blood. They dimly understand the English, and hate them vindictively because they find themselves outcasts among the whites. I know a Eurasian woman—a woman who is outside her two races-a woman without a race that claims her. Unhappy they are-natu

rally. The Eurasian is like the snake, which hates all human creatures.”. "The cross produces beautiful women, I've heard."

"Oh, yes," said Troil indifferently. He tipped his chair back against the stucco wall of the portico. His mouth was sneering. "I say-have you never seen a Eurasian ?"

"Not that I can remember. My work hasn't taken me into their haunts. I'm a naturalist, I think I told you. I'm after orchids, not human rarities."

"I was going on to say that, if you're hunting up oddities, the Eurasian is interesting. The lineal descendant of whatever progeny Eve had by her amour with the serpent. Looks for all the world like his ancestor. His head is flat, and set at the end of a long and peculiarly waving neck. His hair is sparse and dank and of an odd shade of black. His eyes are slits of black that make you think they are green, and their lids are almost non-existent-at any rate, they don't move. And yet, he looks out at you from underneath those lids."

"Worth a few moments of study!" I laughed.

"I don't care for them," said Troil positively. After a pause, he added: “I can't begin to tell you how they make my flesh creep."

We drank in silence; in silence watched the last light of the sun disappear behind the banks of clouds that often come up at sunset, out there. In the dining-room behind us the candles were being lit on the tables, before he spoke again.

"Where do you go from Manila?"

"Heading for Palawan. But I shall go down on a coast-guard vessel, so that I can stop off wherever I see a chance to collect any rarer specimens--the Visayas, for instance."

"If you really want to see the boiling of the races, make a point of dropping into Tacloban. I should be delighted to have you put up at my house." It occurred to him, evidently, that I knew too little of him and his reason for being out there. He continued, speaking slowly: "I am with an English commercial firm. Exile, of course. What is popularly known as a remittance man. That is, my people pay me to stay away from England. I am

overboard rather than face dangers that he sensed ahead.

I looked around for him, in the delicious morning that I was sure must have dispelled his fears of the night. There he was, trim and shiny in his black pantaloons and blue-linen coat, his camphorwood chest at his side, ready to go ashore. When I spoke to him, he gave me his usual impassive jerk of the head. In his eyes was no expression whatever. He did not glance at the water that slid along beneath us. But I had already examined it. There were no snakes in its translucent green.

Troil was awaiting us at the docks, in a low-swung carriage drawn by a native pony-one of those diminutive animals that look as if the spirit had been crushed out of them but that harbor within their scrubby bodies the devil of a temper. An old Filipino drove, his shirt-tails hanging down around the high perch of his seat. The Chinaman, who I was now told was to take the vacant post of No. 1 boy in the household, sat on the step of the calesa, while Troil and I, as became white men, lolled back on the seat. My luggage, and the camphor-wood chest of No. 1 boy, followed in a carabao cart; the creak of its heavy wooden wheels accompanied the perfunctory comments of my host on the ramshackle barrio along the outskirts of which we drove.

The barrio appeared to be a succession of unpaved lanes with high-sounding Spanish names. The lanes wandered off among nipa shacks, swaggered with an attempt at pavements past a few residences of wood, and apologetically joined hands with the quays, sneaking alongside the houses of the few white residents of the place.

To one of the more pretentious of these houses the shirted Filipino drove up, stopping at the door with a stampede of sharp hoofs and a scattering of the coral rock of the roadway that I wondered the decrepit horse could achieve.

Nice house, in the Spanish style. In the centre, a very large sala into which all of the other rooms opened with only the formality of curtains. Around the walls of the sala, numerous rocking-chairs of bent wood-chairs that were too high from the floor for comfort, too much inclined to tip over backward for security.

Along the spaces between the doorways, consoles of carved Narra wood. The walls themselves painted a villainous shade of bright blue. The trail of the land over the whole thing. No sign that in this house an Englishman made his home.

It struck me that Troil seemed loath to have me here. His manner had changed, since I had seen him in Manila. It was that of the punctilious host who was doing all that might be done for a guest, but who in his secret heart wished the guest anywhere save in this particular place. I decided that, after talking with his own kind, his return to his home had been the occasion of a renewed bitterness toward whatever had brought him to this pass. I was more strongly of this opinion when he had ensconced me in one of the bedrooms. To my startled gaze the room was a mass of pink satin covered with cotton lace, of bows of sleazy ribbon, of large conchshells, and sprays of the coarse coral of the islands.

A young China boy brought in my luggage. Another China boy fetched a pitcher of some reddish liquid which showed, floating in its un-iced depths, slices of green limes and rough-skinned pummelos. Troil excused himself and went back to install No. 1 boy.

"Mrs. Troil will be in the sala by the time you have shaken down a bit," he said as he was leaving the room. In his voice was the constraint that I had noticed in his manner.

I hurried through my toilet. I was more curious to see Mrs. Troil than to see the Paloma orchid which had been the reason for my stop-off at Tacloban. As I heard his footsteps returning along the polished floor I followed him into the sala.

I shall never forget my first impression of Mrs. Troil. Her husband's inference that she had once been beautiful had not prepared me for her. A small-boned face, pallid as a jasmine flower. Eyes large, very dark, opaquely dark, and with only rudimentary lashes; corners almost level, but not quite. Mouth almost red, but missing the mark of a fresh pinkness. Thin, narrow-shouldered, flat-chested, small hips that managed in their slenderness to roll as she walked. Nothing fleshy here, nothing passionate, and yet