Neither the pagan tribes nor the Negritos read or write. The Moros, too, are very ignorant, only the priests and students being able to read passages from the Koran and make the Arabic characters. The latest Malay immigrants, who had been influenced by Indian culture, introduced a style of writing that is very queer. Three vowels were used,--a, e, and u. The consonants were represented by as many signs that look a good deal like our shorthand. Although there were three characters to represent the vowels when used alone, whenever a consonant would be pronounced with "a," only the sign of the consonant was used. In order to express a final consonant, or one without the vowel, a tiny cross was made below the character. If "e" was wanted, a dot would be placed over the letter that expressed the consonant, or if the vowel was to be "u," the dot was placed below. Some rainy day, when you have nothing else to do, you can invent some characters to represent our consonants, and with the aid of dots and crosses, write a letter to yourself, and see how you would get along if you were forced to use that kind of alphabet at school. The natives use the Spanish alphabet to-day, which is much like our own. Their language, being full of particles, sounds very funny when they talk. All you would understand would be perhaps, pag, naga, naca, mag, tag, paga; and all this would probably convey but little meaning to you. It is a curious fact that while the dialects of all the tribes are different, many of the ordinary words are common, being slightly changed in the transition. The language is of a Malayan origin, but has a number of Sanskrit words as well as Arabic. From studying these dialects, comparing the construction of the sentence as expressed by different tribes, and by comparing the inflections of homogeneous verbs and nouns, one might arrive at the conclusion that these tribes and races, differing so strikingly among each other, mutually antagonistic, all belong to one great family and have a common origin. But that is a question for the anthropologists to settle; one that will give even the professors all the trouble that they want, and make them wrinkle up their learned foreheads, while among them they arrive at widely-varying decisions, which will be as mutually exclusive as the tribes themselves. It was a rainy day in the dense woods along the Iligan-Marahui road. The soft ground oozed beneath the feet, and a continual dripping was kept up from the low-hanging, saturated foliage. The Moro interpreter, in a red-striped suit and prominent gilt buttons, had come into camp with the report that one of the dattos at Malumbung wanted the military doctor to come up and treat his child, who was afflicted with a fever. The datto had offered protection for the "medico," and, as a fee, a bottle of pure gold. The guides and soldiers, who were waiting in the forest, would conduct the doctor to Malumbung if he cared to go.