... _Chino_ José died, and was given a military funeral. The bier was covered with the Stars and Stripes. A company of native scouts was detailed as an escort, and the local band led the procession to the church. Old "Ichabod," with a long face, and in a dress suit, with a purple four-in-hand tie, followed among the candle-bearers with long strides. The tapers burning in the nave resembled a small bonfire, and exhaustive masses finally resulted, so I judge, in getting the old heathen's spirit out of purgatory. Good old _Chino_ José! He had left his widow fifty thousand "Mex," of which the priest received his share; also the doctor, for the hypodermic injections of the past three months. Then came the wedding of Bazon, whose bride, for her rebellious love, had recently been driven from her mother's home. Bazon, touched by this act of loyalty, cut his engagement with another girl and made the preparations for the wedding feast. I met the little Maraquita at Bazon's reception, and conversed with her through an interpreter. "The _señorita_ says," so the interpreter informed me, "she appreciates your conversation very much, and thinks you play the piano very well. She has a new piano in her house that came from Paris. In a little while the _señorita_ will depart for Spain, where she intends to study in a convent for a year." Ah, Maraquita! She had had an _Insurrecto_ general for a suitor, and had turned him down. And she had jilted Joe, the French constabulary officer, and had rejected a neighboring merchant's offer for her hand of fifty carabaos. I have to-day a small reminder of her dainty needlework--a family of Visayan dolls which she had dressed according to the native mode. One day the undertaker's boat dropped in with a detachment of the burial corps aboard. The bodies of the soldiers that had slept for so long in the convent garden were removed, and taken in brass caskets back across the sea.... We started out one morning on constabulary ponies, brilliantly caparisoned in scarlet blankets and new saddles. "Ichabod," the Kansas _maestro_, had proposed to guide us to Misamis over the mountain trail. It was not long, however, before one spoke of trails in the past tense. The last place that was on the map--a town of questionable loyalty, that we had gladly left late in the afternoon--now seemed, as we remembered it, in contrast with the wilderness, a small metropolis. The Kansan still insisted that he was not lost. "Do you know where we are?" I asked. "Wa-al," he replied, "those mountains ought to be 'way over on the other side of us, and the flat side of the moon ought to be turned the other way." We wandered for ten hours through prairies of tall buffalo-grass, at last discovering a trail that led down to the sea. The ponies were as stiff as though they had been made of wood instead of flesh and blood.