As the Manila cooking arrangements are rude, so I suspect are the pantry's dish-washing opportunities. I really should hesitate to enter even our club-kitchen, for certain dim suggestions which are conveyed to the senses from spoons and forks, and certain plate surfaces that would calm troubled waters if hung from a ship's side, all hint at unappetizing sights. All in all, the less one sees of native cooking, in transitu, the greater will one's appetite be.
I had expected an early introduction to earthquakes, but none have occurred so far, and I am almost tempted to get reckless. Soon after my arrival I was inclined to put my chemical bottles in a box of sawdust, empty part of the water out of my pitcher, and pack my watch in cotton-wool in anticipation of some nocturnal disturbance. For the old stagers who saw the city fall to pieces back in the '80's deem it their duty to alarm the new arrival, and almost turn pale when a heavy dray rolls by over the cobblestones in the street near the club, or make ready to fly out-of-doors at the first suspicion of vibration.
A word or two more about the floors in Manila houses. I don't suppose there is a soft-wood tree in the islands, and as a result one sees some very interesting hard-wood productions. The floors come under this category. Rough-hewn as they are--out of huge hand-sawed hard-wood planks--they are models. By certain processes of polishing with banana leaves and greasy rags, they are made to shine like genius itself, and give such a clean, cool air to the houses that one is compelled to regard them with admiration. In fact, there is a certain charm in Manila about many specimens of hand-work that one encounters everywhere. The stilted regularities--as our good professor used to say--of machine-made articles are frequently conspicuous by their absence, and instead one sees the inequalities, the lack of exact repetition, the informality of lines that are not just perpendicular or horizontal, all of which make up the charm of work that is handmade, that reflects the movements of a living arm and mind rather than those of a wheel or a lever.
The curious windows that are everywhere are likewise instructive. Like the blinds, they slide in grooves on the railings of the balconies, and serve to shut out the weather from the interior. They consist of frames containing a multitude of small lattice-work squares, into which are placed thin, flat, translucent sea-shells which admit light, but are not look-throughable. We have all heard of shell-roads, but never of shell-windows, and one misses the presence of glass until he has got accustomed to a Manila house, whose sliding sides are one vast window that is rarely closed.