In a downpour of rain I left one morning for Aloran, down the coast and up the winding river. Prisoners furnished by the _presidente_ manned the _banca_. They were guarded by a barefooted municipal policeman, who, on falling presently to sleep, would probably have lost his Mauser overboard had not one of the convicts rescued it and courteously returned it to him. It was a wet and lonesome pull up the Aloran River, walled in on both sides by _nipa_ jungles, and forever winding in and out. After an hour or so, while I was wondering what we were coming to, we met a raft poled down the stream with "Red" and a young Austrian constabulary officer aboard. Finding a little teacup of a house, I moved in, and, before an interested throng of natives, started to unpack my trunks and boxes with a sense of genuine relief; for I had had four months of traveling and living out of steamer-trunks. But I returned to Oroquieta all in good time for the doctor's birthday and the annual Oroquieta ball. I found the doctor wandering about Aloran late one afternoon; for he had been attending a sick Chinaman. We started back together through the night, and, in the darkness, voices greeted us, or snarled a "_Buenas noches_" at us as we passed. Bridges that carabaos had fallen through were crossed successfully, and we arrived at Oroquieta during the band concert. The foreign colony at Oroquieta was more interesting than the _personæ dramatis_ of the "Canterbury Tales." Where to begin I do not know. But, anyway, there was my old friend the constabulary captain, "Foxy Grandpa," as we called him then, because when he was not engaged in telling how he had arrested somebody in Arizona, he was playing practical jokes or doing tricks with cards and handkerchiefs. And then there was the "Arizona Babe," a blonde of the Southwestern type, affianced to the commissary sergeant. The wife o£ the commanding officer, a veritable O'Dowd, and little Flora, daughter of O'Dowd, who rode around town in a pony cart, were leaders of society for the subpost.