Playthings are scarce in Filipinia. The boys and girls would be delighted with a cheap toy cart or drum. The dolls are made of cotton cloth, with painted cheeks, and beads for eyes, dressed up in scraps of colored _piña_ cloth in imitation of fine _señoritas_. Kite-time and the peg-top season come as in America. The Filipino kites are built like butterflies or birds, and sometimes carry a long beak which is of use in case of war. Kite-fighting is a favorite amusement in the islands, where the native boys are expert in the art of making and manipulating kites. Among the other games they play is one that an American would recognize as "tip-cat," and another which would be more difficult to recognize as football. This is played with a light ball or woven framework of rattan. The ball is batted from one player to another by the heel. The national pet is neither dog nor cat; it is a chicken and the grown-up people think almost as much of this unique pet as the children do. Music comes natural to the Filipinos. Their instruments are violins, guitars, and flutes. The boys make flutes of young bamboo-stalks which are very accurate, and give out a peculiar mellow tone. _Fiesta_-days and Sundays are the great events in Filipinia. On Sunday morning the young girls, in their white veils and clean dresses, go to mass, and, making the sign of the cross before the church, kneel down upon the bare tiles while the service is performed. The church to them is the magnificent abode of saints and angels. The wax images and altar paintings are the only things they have in art except the cheap prints of the saints and Virgin, which they hang conspicuously in their homes. _Pascua_, or Christmas week, is a great holiday, but it is very different from the Christmas that we know. The children going to the convent school are taught to sing the Spanish Christmas carols, and on Christmas eve they go outdoors and sing them on the streets in the bright starlight. Their voices, although untrained, are very delicate and sweet. The native music, which they often sing, like all the music of the southern isles, is very melancholy, often rising to a hopeless wail. On the last day of school the padre will distribute raisins, nuts, and figs, which are the only Christmas presents that the boys and girls receive. At the parochial schools they are taught to do their studying aloud, and always to commit the text to memory. If memory should fail them in a crisis, they would be extremely liable to have their ears pulled by the priest, or to be made to kneel upon the floor with outstretched arms, thus making the recitation somewhat of a tragedy; but there are also prizes for the meritorious. One book includes the whole curriculum--religion, table manners, grammar, "numbers," and geography--arranged in catechisms of convenient length. The boys are separated from the girls in school and church, and I have very seldom seen them play together in their homes.