We had left headquarters at Lolomboy in the early morning, with a pony hitched to a cartello containing the signal-flags, tent equipage, and rations for three days. Crossing the ferry at Bocaue, we struck a northerly route running west of Malolos, the old Filipino capital. We had covered a number of miles over a dusty road and through sweltering heat, when a quaint little barrio shaded by cocoa and palm trees on the banks of the Cianti River was reached. As the pony jogged along through the heart of the village, turning out occasionally for the little pickaninnies who played in the street, my eyes fell on something unusual for this section of the world,――an exceptionally beautiful señorita, apparently a mestizo of European extraction, presiding over a fruit-stand in front of a large hacienda, from which exhaled the sweet odor of grated-cocoanut boiling in the syrup of the sugarcane. “Kane, did you see that?” I asked. “Yes, some class; I wonder where that complexion came from,” he replied. “Let’s try and find out,” I said. It was about the hour for the Filipino siesta and time for “tiffin”; so, drawing under the shade of a large mango tree, we tied and fed the pony, and I informed the engineer that I was going to buy some eggs. “Let me buy them,” said Kane, smilingly. Approaching the hacienda, I saw standing under the eaves, with the grace of a Wanamaker cloak-model and the beauty of the allegorical Psyche, a Filipino señorita still in her ’teens, whose raven tresses would have been the envy of the “Sutherland sisters.” “Buenos dios, señorita,” I ventured. “Buenos dios,” she replied. “Tiene weibus?” (Tagalog for “Have you eggs?”). “Si, señor,” she replied. Kane, whose knowledge of the dialects was limited, appearing on the scene, said, “How do you do?” “Quite well, thank you; how are you?” she said. “Better,” said Kane, smiling in expressive surprise. At first I thought it an apparition with a voice; to hear good old United States spoken in a feminine voice, after being inflicted for months with the pigeon English of Chinese and the smattering cackle of the natives was almost too good to be true. “Are you soldiers the advance-guard of a regiment, or merely out for a joy ride?” she inquired, showing two rows of pearly teeth through an inquisitive smile. “Joy ride is right, with room for six,” replied Kane. Here my curiosity led me to inquire as to how this illustrious personage had acquired such fluency in the English language. Whereupon she informed me that she had been educated at the University of Manila and was a school-teacher home on vacation.