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

UNOFFICIAL LETTERS OF

Commission, characterizing its advent in the Philippine Islands as the crowning event in the history
of the New World. It is not as amusing as one
might imagine to listen to eulogies for half an hour
in an unknown tongue. The pleased and interested
expression with which Judge Taft and his colleagues received the first ten or fifteen minutes of
the eloquent panegyric gradually stiffened into a
set smile, and I saw more than one yawn suppressed
behind a Manila hat brim before the orator concluded. It was an experience to remember and we
went back to the Sumner tired and happy. The
long trip down the river on the launch was even
more beautiful in the moonlight than it had been
in the glare of the morning heat.
April 3, I90I.
ALL day we have been steaming past a lonely
coast where the jungle encroaches on the shore
and rugged mountains suggest a wild interior country. Toward evening our course lay between the
mainland and an island; not far inland the isolated
cone of a volcano varied the coast line. The moon
rose in a sky bright with the reflected glory of a
gorgeous sunset; the breeze was fresh and the sea
a bit rough; we sat on deck wrapped in shawls, a
rather unusual experience so far south. We were
in latitude six degrees north. It has been a relief to
be on shipboard for twenty-four hours, and we have
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