The Chinese half-breed is described in the same manner. Literature for the Filipinos The only literature accessible to the Filipinos of little culture and also to those of the better class consisted of Corridos which constitute the profane literature, and the Pasion and the Novenas which formed the religious reading. Corridos, Pasiones, and Novenas were printed in abundance, in cheap editions, in Spanish as well as in the dialects of the country. The Corridos are stories in verse about historic events, falsified and fanciful, and love tragedies full of wonderful events mixed with divine prodigies and diabolical magics--all lengthy, exaggerated, puerile, and absurd in the extreme. None of the characters is native. All are Turks, Arabs, knights, errants, ambassadors, dukes, warriors in armor provided with magic arms and with balsams like the famous one of Fierabras, good Castilians and bad strangers. All the characters are antipodal to Philippine realities and with the semblance of the real and true being from unknown lands and prodigious races. The same is true with the scene of activities; wonderful lands, Palestine, the kingdom of Navarra, the Empire of Great Kahn, the Palace of Macedonia, and not only are they ignorant of, and do they falsify, the face of the earth, but the planetary system itself suffers a radical change. Palms and tamarind grow in the vicinities of Moscow; Palestine and Macedonia are covered with prairies like Norway and Switzerland, and whales appear in the Mediterranean. Events which begin in the morning in Macedonia and in the most natural manner in the afternoon of the same day in a palace of Babylonia, and a princess of Aragon captured early in the morning in Sicily discusses at midnight and without an interpreter with a Moro of Samarcanda. The Pasion, a work in verse in the different Filipino dialects, is not only the passion of Christ, but it consists of a sort of abridged edition of sacred history. The Novenas are religious booklets dedicated to a saint whose favor is invoked in order to obtain from God such and such favors. They consist of a system of prayers in relation to certain miracles with reflections about the saint, which are said every day for a period of nine consecutive days. To Virgin Mary is attributed the origin of the Novenas because she venerated the number 9 in memory of the fact that nine days it was when she was apprised of the incarnation of the divine Messiah, and also because of the nine months in which she carried Him in her virgin womb. (Novena to Jesus, Maria, and Jose, Manila, 1903, in the Exordium.)