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Costumes The costumes of the women are admittedly unique and attractive. Old Spain gave the peasant’s neckerchief that has evolved into the pañuelo; the court train of her damas gave the saya; her priests gave the tapis; the ground plan is Malayan, the sleeves swelled to suit the climate. This, which has changed but little in over three centuries, is the predominating model; but America, Paris, half Asia, and the South Pacific contribute also to the revue des modes: georgette crèpe and coconut fiber rain cape and skirt, white duck and rengue, all in the same rain shower on the same block.

The Shops Modern shops with plate-glass fronts, office buildings with their elevators, elbow in between the open-fronted Chino shops of the Rosario. And the carabao snails by, and the “little gray hawk” that “hangs aloft in the air,” happens to be an aëroplane.

The Pasig Down by the entrance to the Pasig River modern steamers are warped to the river wall, and farther up dumpy river launches shuffle about their work of conveying to the big household of Manila chickens, pigs, fruits, and vegetables; a string of bamboo-roofed cascoes lie in wait by the market; sturdy bargemen with thirty-foot bamboo poles shove the unwieldy lorchas about, and the tiny bancas now toddle bravely along, now reel and wobble from the cuffs of their elders. The river is navigable for miles, and a trip upstream reveals successive combinations of meadows, high banks fringed with feathery bamboo, and here and there a village with its nipa houses and its gray stone church embowered in groves of coconuts and mangoes.