The typhoon of the Philippines is not to be disdained. A picture formed in my mind of falling trees, rent bridges, melted roads. I stopped, hesitating, looked up at the blue sky above, listened to the regular breath of the wind. "Nonsense!" I said, and just then a sudden gust screeched overhead; the coconuts bent in half circles, snapped back, bent again with weird elasticity. Before my mind could fairly seize them, before the impression of them could be more than hazy and faint as those of a dream, these manifestations ceased. The wind fell dead, the trees came back to equilibrium. A heavy torpor descended upon the land. "I'll come in, Marietta," I decided, "and you'll tell me more of the Negritos in the hills." She did not answer, but waited for me at the head of the bamboo ladder--a weird, dried-up mummy of a woman, with teeth corroded by the betel-nut, and eyes that flashed hard beneath the heavy, yellow folds of the lids--an old witch, fit for broomstick rides and the nightmares of children. Inside, I sat down upon the bench by the window while she squatted upon the bamboo-strip floor, a big cheroot tied up with hemp fibre in her mouth, a hollow coconut filled with tuba at her side. But she did not speak. A strange taciturnity was upon her; she sat there speechless, motionless, like some monstrous idol, her lids half-dropped over eyes that showed opaque and dead. "Well, Marietta," I said at length; "what about that coconut milk you promised me?" "Oh, señor, pardon me, pardon your servant. 'Tis the baguio. When I feel the baguio coming I forget; I think of other days." She half rose, then sank again upon her heels, her mind refusing to stay with the present. "For there were other days, señor," she said gently; "ah, yes, far other days!" She rocked herself slowly to and fro, her face in her hands. Outside, the heavy torpor was suddenly torn by a shriek in the upper layers of air. A few great drops pattered resoundingly upon the nipa roof, then heat and silence reigned again, with the torment of the woman's soul. Curiously I looked upon the old crone. She sat there rocking gently from side to side, her lips bubbling in meaningless mutters. Then her yellow paw crept down her arid bosom, fumbled beneath her camisa, and reappeared with something in it that flashed gold. She pressed it to her withered lips--and I saw that it was a locket--pressed it to her withered lips with a singular intensity of passion; pressed it there again and again--and that sudden flash of something long gone, of a spark, dying, perhaps, but which in that ruined body should have been long dead, moved me with uneasiness, as if I were watching, and a party to, a sacrilege. But she dropped her hands upon her lap in a gesture of infinite hopelessness and she began to speak, to speak in a queer sing-song, a monotonous chant, like some religious recital of her Malay ancestors suddenly coming back to her through the ages.