The day closed with a _baile_, given by the Ilokanos living in Bontok. Many of these are leaving their narrow coastal plains on the shores of the China Sea and making their way through the passes to the interior, some of them going as far as the Cagayán country. It is only a question of time when they will have spread over the whole of Northern Luzon. This _baile_ was like all native balls, _rigodón_, waltzes, and two-steps; remarkably well done too, these, considering that the _señoritas_ wear the native slipper, the _chinela_, which is nothing more or less than a heelless bed-room slipper. But one _señorita_ danced the _jota_ for us, a graceful and charming dance, with one cavalier as her partner, friend or enemy according to the phase intended to be depicted. CHAPTER XIX The native village.--Houses.--Pitapit.--Native institutions.--Lumawig. The next day, the 9th, Father Clapp very kindly offered to show Strong and me the native village, an invitation we made haste to accept. This village, if village it be, marches with the Christian town, so that we at once got into it, to find it a collection of huts put down higgledy-piggledy, with almost no reference to convenience of access. Streets, of course, there were none, nor even regular paths from house to house; you just picked your way from one habitation to the next as best you could, carefully avoiding the pig-sty which each considerable hut seemed to have. I wish I could say that the Igorot out of rude materials had built a simple but clean and commodious house! He has done nothing of the sort: his materials are rude enough, but his hut is small, low, black, and dirty, so far as one could tell in walking through. The poorer houses have two rooms, an inner and an outer, both very small (say 6 × 6 feet and 4 × 6 feet respectively, inside measurement), cooking being done in the outer and the inner serving as a sleeping-room. There is no flooring; although the fire is under the roof (grass thatch), no smoke-hole has been thought of, and as there are no window-openings, and the entrance is shut up tight by night and the fire kept up if the weather be cold, the interior is as black as one would expect from the constant deposit of soot. The ridge-pole of the poorer houses is so low that a man of even small stature could not stand up under it. The well-to-do have better houses, not only larger, but having a sort of second story; these are soot-black, too. We made no examination of these, not even a cursory one. The pig-sty is usually next to the house, and is nothing but a rock-lined pit, open to the sky, except where the house is built directly over it. It is astonishing that these people should not have evolved a better house, seeing that the Ifugaos have done it, and the Kalinga houses, which we were to see in a day or two, are really superior affairs.