sweaty, naked bodies of the dancers and the spectators with their long black hair, the fantastically decorated small basket hat perched on the back of the head, the enlarged lobes of their ears filled with wooden plugs or with dangling ornaments, the women nude to the waist and from the knees, with hair filled with strands of beads, while, peering, squeezing, shoving through the human mass, are innumerable naked children, with bright, black, excited eyes-all these go to make a picture of magnificent savagery. Among the more civilized people of the western territory head hunting is no longer in vogue and has not been for generations, so the people travel around freely in many districts and down to the coast; but the farther eastward and northward one proceeds the greater becomes the fear among the people of moving about the country, until finally one arrives at small towns in northern Bontoc, where the people do not dare leave the immediate purlieu of their village (an area of 3 or 4 miles, possibly) for fear of losing their heads. There are no sharp lines of demarcation between the peaceful and head-hunting people, but a gradual shading from those who never take heads through those who now and again are guilty of the practice among the villages to the east of them, but who travel freely and peacefully among the people of the western extension, to those who never miss an opportunity to get a head, whether it be man, woman, or child. Even among the worst head-hunting villages one finds that they are friends with one or two other towns-a peace not usually very stable in character, however. The custom of head hunting has left its impress on even the most peaceful people in the shape of watchtowers in some of the towns, where the practice ceased seventy years or more ago. Again we find among the entire people that the women bear the larger burden of toil, though it is not to be assumed that the men are drones by any means, for they do a large amount of constructive work on houses, dams, irrigating ditches, rice dikes, road repairing, mining, and cargadoring, or packing. Nor do we find the line drawn markedly as to what is woman's work, such as we find among the American Indians. The motive for this unequal distribution of labor was probably a defensive one, as exemplified to-day among the head-hunters of the north and east, where women go out to work in the rice fields and camote patches always under the constant protection of the men, who, armed with spears, axes, and shields, watch all day long from salient points of the hills for their enemies. They enjoy all the humors of life with which they come in contact, are easily stirred to laughter, but, like the American Indian, are stoical under torture. They are rich only in their contentment, living on rice and camotes as a daily diet, never killing an animal, except to invite all their neighbors to the feast, and they enjoy dog meat most of any. The great mass of the people are poverty stricken, which does not mean that there exists any unusual or abnormal condition, for, as primitive people caring nothing for money, having within their own communal limits nearly all that their mode of life and customs demand for their daily needs, they always have been poor; no ambitions have yet been aroused (except in a few isolated cases) to accumulate or surround themselves with any comforts of life, as measured by the standard of even the poorest Filipinos. The types of houses among the Igorots differ widely. In the western part of the province they are better built, so far as comfort goes, than in the eastern, being warmer, built of wood, or of runo-a grass reed-and raised off the ground. They often have two or three rooms where the eastern house has one; the fireplaces are separated from the sleeping quarters; small benches for beds are sometimes used, or the floors are laid in split bamboo, which gives a fairly comfortable sleeping place. In the country eastward, where the nights are cold, the single-roomed houses often have nothing but the ground for a floor, no windows, and low, narrow doors, through which they must needs creep on hands and knees into a black hole filled with smoke, and with walls and roof begrimed with soot. Entire families lie huddled closely together on the earth floor at night that they may keep warm. The bedswhen they have any-are solid planks, 2 inches thick, 18 inches wide, and 5 feet long, with the centers slightly hollowed out. A block of wood serves for a pillow. In Bontoc the houses are somewhat elaborated in that up under the high-angled, grass-thatched roofs, a room is built for the storage of palay and dried camotes. The family lives on the ground in a room well ventilated in the daytime, as it is open to the air around its sides for a distance of 3 feet between the side wall of planks, 3 feet high, and the overhanging grass roof, all the cooking being done over an open fire in the corner, from which the smoke finds easy access outward. One end of the room is devoted to sleeping quarters, in the shape of a sleeping box extending entirely across one end of the house, say 15 feet long by 5 feet wide and 3 feet 6 inches high. The ground is the floor of this room. At night before the family goes to bed a fire is built on the floor in the box, and when the place is well heated up, it is raked out and the family crawls in, shuts the door tight, and goes to sleep, the temperature dropping from a superheated condition to nearly that of the chilly outside air by morning. To keep the heat in, all the cracks of this sleeping box are often carefully closed with clay, the result being an air-tight compartment, with hardly a breath of ventilation. One is not surprised to find a great many of these people suffer from all degrees of smoke-inflamed eyes, in many cases causing the loss of their sight entirely. In all the houses to the eastward the pigpen is an important factor and consists of a sunken pit alongside the house, with a hole for the retreat of the animals beneath the house, all of which is walled up with stones. The diet of the Igorots is rice and sweet potatoes; year in and year out they live on this simple food-rice when they have it, sweet potatoes or camotes when the more expensive crop is short. Meat seems hardly ever to be eaten by the Igorots, except at religious ceremonies, or when they steal it, or again when they catch a deer by running it down and throwing a net over it. When they have meat—be it dog, horse, carabao, hog, or deer-it is consumed, even to the hide, as speedily as possible, it apparently not being ethical to stop eating until every scrap is gone. The entrails are looked upon as delicacies. During the season of the locusts or grasshoppers a variation in diet is enjoyed, as .whole towns, with nets and bags, turn out to gather the pests. After being cooked on stones or fried in earthern bowls, they are eaten until no more can be consumed, and then the remainder of the "catch" is dried in the sun and stored away for future use. I understand that the eating of grasshoppers is a general habit in the islands. The cost of food stuffs in the main is lower on the coast. Rice is higher in the western part of the province at the present time than it has been for years, and yet the price has never exceeded 6 pesos a picul. In the Bontoc country the standard price has been, and is now, about 2 pesos a picul, though it is becoming more difficult to purchase rice at all, owing to the abnormally dry season which has visited the province this year, and resulted in the killing of at least one-half of the young crop. Camotes, or sweet potatoes, sell for a peseta a basket-about one-third of a bushel-and are always obtainable. Hogs are rather scarce and are said to be high in price, a small porker costing 2 pesos and a full-grown medium-weight hog 5 to 6 pesos, while big hogs bring anywhere from 8 to 15 pesos. Good beef cattle sell from 50 pesos a head in a herd to 80 to 100 pesos for single animals. Carabao sell from 60 to 100 pesos per head. Sheep, of which there are few, bring from 2 to 5 pesos per head; horses from 50 pesos for poor animals to 150 for fine ones, though they are hard to find at any price. Chickens are from a peseta for broiling size to a peso for heavy hens and roosters, the majority of the sizable chickens being brought 1. EXTERIOR OF HOUSE OF HEAD-HUNTER IN BANAUE, LEPANTO-BONTOC, SHOWING THE SKULLS OF ENEMIES AND WATER BUFFALO, 2. IGOROT CHIEFS OF NUEVA 3. IGOROT PACKERS ON THE BENGUET TRAIL. 1 IGOROTS OF THE POORER CLASS. VIZCAYA. into the province by the dealers from the coast; and the same is true of the hogs. Eggs in the eastern section are sold in scant quantities at 15 centavos a dozen, and bring twice or three times that amount in the western section. Meat is seldom sold in the province, but the standard price, when a beef or deer is killed for the market, is 2 pesetas per pound. As a matter of fact, while these prices for food stuffs are practically as quoted, supplies, with the exception of camotes, are very difficult to buy, the Igorot not being much of a vendor, and usually keeping little more than enough to meet his almost immediate wants. Without a constabulary supply store, or a garden, rice field, or cattle of his own, an American could hardly subsist in the province. Flour is unknown in the province among the people; corn is sometimes raised in small quantities, as are bead-like tomatoes and white potatoes, and beans are planted usually once a year. The wild Igorot does not raise bananas or fruits, but the Cristiano does, in small quantities. The cost of living of the average family is difficult to determine, but it is certainly very low; exclusive of labor, the average Igorot probably does not spend over 5 pesos per year on himself and family, and this only to buy salt at the coast, some of the vilest leaf tobacco, brass wire, and now and again a spear or a head ax, if he lives in the eastern part of the province. They are actually self-sustaining in the family unit, or at least in the barrio unit, as they weave their own blankets and gee strings and the women's belts, raise their own food crops and animals-the average man seldom has more than one hog-and build and repair their own houses. Estimating the annual expense of a family by the work done we would have in Bontoc something like this, based on wage scale of 6 centavos per day for a man, 4 for a woman, and 2 for each child, or 16 centavos per day if they all labored; a fair estimate for actual ten-hour day's labor might possibly reach one hundred and fifty full days in a year, or 24 pesos for the year for the work required in sustaining the life of a family. In the western sections the rate of wage for private work is two and one-half times as large. The wage scale will be further discussed in its proper place. The entire indigenous population is stationary, in the sense that they never move from a very limited area, say a few miles, and so strong is this communal tendency and fear of travel that the eastern people seldom ever visit the coast or go out of their own districts, and in some towns they dare not move, if they would, from the narrow town and field limits for fear of losing their heads. Efforts made this year to secure laborers from this province for the Benguet road only succeeded in inducing eight men to make the trip, though the wages offered, with food in addition, were ten times as large as they could get at home in Bontoc and two and one-half times those paid in Lepanto. The rest of the world, to these people, is filled with terrible spirits and bad people. It is quite customary, however, for an entire village to move to a new site, but never more than a few miles from the old one, and then only on serious provocation, such as finding blood on the rocks from which the tribunal is made, a particularly suspicious or peculiar death, or, from the more practical reason, to secure better lands for cultivation. As a rule, the houses of the Igorots of Benguet, and the yards surrounding the houses, are fairly clean. In person they appear to be extremely dirty. Those of Nueva Vizcaya are said to be extremely filthy, both in person and houses. The latter are alive with vermin, the chickens roost in baskets hung along the roof beams, and the pigs live under the houses. The people rarely bathe, and are consequently afflicted with various skin diseases. They use intoxicating liquors to a much greater extent than the civilized people and often show the effects of undue indulgence. The use of the betel nut is by no means as general as with other tribes. The climatic conditions are healthful, but the living conditions of the people are the reverse, and it is believed that the death rate |