Unofficial letters of an official's wife [by] Edith Moses.

AN OFFICIAL'S WIFE

back at the Ayuntamiento by three o'clock, but no
one who is not obliged to do so goes out or makes
calls before five o'clock. After tea we drive on the
Luneta until dinner at eight o'clock.
Last evening we dined with the chief quartermaster and his wife, who live near us and have
been especially kind to us. The chief quartermaster
is a most important functionary in the army. I
had always thought of the army as made up of
fighting men, soldiers, and their officers, and had
no idea of the numbers of other persons connected
with it who never fight at all, but keep supply stores
and groceries, build houses, and do all sorts of other
things. There are army coal yards and butcher
shops and hospitals in Manila, and the managers
of all these departments are officers, and woe to
the innocent civilian who addresses a major-surgeon as doctor, or speaks of a quartermaster captain as " our coal man." The commissary corps is
the most useful and attractive in the army, from my
point of view. It keeps the grocery store, and
there we get all our supplies at a price which makes
living here possible.
I think that the butcher business must be new to
the officers, or maybe it is under the direction of
the volunteers. The allowance of each subscriber
for meat (one sends in a written application for a
certain number of pounds per diem) is cut off from
that part of the animal which happens to be under
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