On Saturdays, the boys go to the mountains to buy eggs. Their first stop is the _hacienda_ on the outskirts of the town--a large, cool _nipa_ house, with broad verandas, situated in a grove of palms. Around the veranda are the nests of woven baskets where the chickens are encouraged to lay eggs. Sucking a juicy mango, they proceed upon their journey through a field of sugar-cane. They stop perhaps at the rude mill where the brown sugar is prepared and molded in the shells of cocoanuts. They quench their thirst here with a stick of sugar-cane, and, peeling the sweet stalk with their teeth, they disappear beyond the hill. Now they have reached a wonderful country, where the monkeys and the parrots chatter in the trees. They can set traps for little parrots with a net of fine thread fastened to the branches. Only a little further on is a small mountain _barrio_, where naked, lazy men lie in the sun all day, and the women weave bright-colored blankets on their looms. Returning with their handkerchiefs tied full of eggs, the boys reach home about sundown. The thought of being late to supper never worries them; the Filipino is notoriously unpunctual at meals. The boys will cook their own rice, and spread out the sleeping-mat wherever the sunset finds them. One shelter is as good as another, and they just as often sleep away from home as in their own beds. Their parents never worry about the children, for they know that, like Bo-peep's sheep, they will come back some time, and it doesn't make much difference when. Early in April the rice-fields are flooded by the irrigation ditches that the river or the mountain streams have filled with water. A plow made of the notch of a tree is used to break the soil. A carabao is used for this work, as it is impossible to mire him even in the deepest mud. The boys and girls, together with the men and women, wearing enormous sun-hats--in the crown of which there is a place for cigarettes and matches--and with bared legs, work in the steaming fields throughout the planting season. As the rice grows taller, the crows are frightened away by strings of flags manipulated from a station in the center of the paddy. Scarecrows are built whenever there are any clothes to spare; but as the Filipino even utilizes rags, the scarecrow often has to go in shocking _négligée_. After the harvest season, when the entire village reaps the rice with bolos, the dry field is given over to the ponies, and the carabaos, and the white storks, who never desert their burly friend, the carabao, but often are seen perching on his back. The work of husking and pounding the crop then occupies the village.