Lottery Chances and Mischances—An American Cigarette-Making Machine and its Fate—Closing up Business—How the Foreigner Feels Toward Life in Manila—Why the English and Germans Return—Restlessness among the Natives—Their Persecution—Departure and Farewell.  
August 25th.
 
I lost $80,000 yesterday. Perhaps I have spoken of lottery tickets, but have failed to say what an important institution in Manila the “Lotería Nacional” really is. Drawings come each month over in the Lottery Building in Old Manila, and everybody is invited to inspect the fairness with which the prize-balls drop out of one revolving cylinder like a peanut-roaster while the ticket-number balls slide out of the other. The Government runs the lottery to provide itself with revenue, and starts off by putting twenty-five per cent. of the value of the ticket-issue into its own coffers. If all the tickets are not sold, the Lotería Nacional keeps the balance for itself and promptly pockets whatever prizes those tickets draw. Lottery tickets are everywhere, in every window, and urchins of all sizes and genders moon about the streets selling little twentieths [214]to such as haven’t the ten dollars to buy a whole one. Guests at dinner play cards for lottery tickets paid for by the losers, Englishmen bet lottery tickets that the Esmeralda won’t bring the mail from home, and natives dream of lucky numbers, to go searching all over town for the pieces that bear the figures of their visions.
 
Four months ago I got reckless enough to plank $10 on the counter of the little shop, which, at the corner of the Escolta and the Puente de Espa?a, is said to dispense the largest number of winning tickets, and became the owner of number 1700. It sounded too even, too commonplace, to be lucky, but as it was considered unlucky to change a ticket once handed you, I trudged off and locked the paper in the safe. The drawing came, and 1700 drew $100. Fortune seemed bound my way, so I made arrangements (as so many buyers of lucky tickets do) to keep 1700 every month. My name was put in the paper as holding 1700, and for three long months I remembered to send my servant to the Government office ten days before the drawing, for the ticket reserved in my name. But for three drawings it never tempted fortune. Last week I forgot lottery and everything else in our further straggle with a new piece of American machinery which was being introduced for the first time to Manila, and woke up to-day to find it the [215]occasion of the drawing. My ticket—uncalled for—had been sold. At noon I walked by the little tienda whose proprietor had first given me the fatal number, to see him perched up on a step-ladder, posting up the big prizes, as fast as they came to his wife by telephone. The space opposite the first prize of $80,000 was empty. His wife handed him a paper. Into the grooves he slid a figure 1, then a 7, and then two ciphers. Ye gods—my ticket! The capital prize—not mine! $80,000 lost because I forgot—and to think that the whole sum would have been paid in hard, jingling coin, for which I should have had to send a dray or two! But I am not quite so inconsolable as my friends the two Englishmen, who kept their ticket for two years, and at last, discouraged, sold it, Christmas-eve, to a native clerk, only to wake up next day and find it had drawn $100,000. They have never been the same since. Nor have I.
 
And the machine that caused all the trouble—another whim of our rich friend, the owner of the fire-engine, who saw from the catalogues on our office table that American cigarette-machines could turn out 125,000 pieces a day against some 60,000, the capacity of the French mechanisms, which were in use in all the great factories in Manila. He wanted one for his friend that ran the little tobacco-mill up in [216]a back street, for whom he furnished the capital. If it worked, he was in the market for two dozen more, and vowed to knock spots out of the big Compa?ía General and Fábrica Insular.
 
Out came our machine some weeks ago, and with it two skilled machinists to make it work. The big companies pricked up their ears and appeared clearly averse to seeing an American article introduced, which should outclass the French machines for which they had contracted.
 
One morning the two machinists came to our office and handed us an anonymous note which had been thrust under the door of their room at the Hotel Oriente:
 
“Stop your work—it will be better for you.”
 
It was perhaps not diplomatic, but we told them the story of the two Protestant missionaries who some years before came to Manila and attempted to preach their doctrines in the face of Catholic disapproval. One morning they found a piece of paper beneath their door in the same hotel, reading:
 
“You are warned to desist your preaching.”
 
Paying no attention to the warning, they woke up two sunrises later on to find another note beneath the door:
 
“Stop your work and leave the city, or take the consequences.” [217]
 
Still they heeded not; and a third paper under the door, some days later, read:
 
“For the last time you are warned to leave. Heed this and beware of neglect to do so.”
 
But, like Christian soldiers, they were only the more zealous in their work.
 
In two days more they were found dead in their rooms—poisoned.
 
Our friends, the engineers, were not soothed by a relation of these facts, but kept on with their work. In three days they, too, got a second warning:
 
“Leave your work and go away by the first steamer.”
 
Things began to look serious, and the more timid mechanic of the two could hardly be restrained from buying a ticket to Hong Kong.
 
When, however, in two more days, a third piece of yellow paper was slipped into their rooms, bearing the pencilled words, “For the last time you are told to take the next steamer,” the matter assumed such proportions that we arranged to have them see the Archbishop, whose knowledge is far-reaching and whose power complete. The letters were suddenly stopped and the work on the machine carried to a successful completion.
 
Then came the day of trial, and invitations were extended to interested persons to view the operation. [218]The machine was started, and the cigarettes began to sizzle out at the rate of nearly two hundred to the minute. But scarcely had the run begun before there was a sudden jar, several of the important parts gave way, and the machine was a wreck. It had been tampered with, and it was evident that the instigators of the anonymous letters had taken this more effective means of stopping competition.
 
The parts could not be made in Manila; America was far away, and our two machinists have just gone home in disgust.
 
Is it a wonder that I forgot the lottery drawing?
 
Somehow there are currents of trouble in the air, and some of the old residents say they wouldn’t be surprised to see the outbreak of a revolution among the natives. Peculiar night-fires have been seen now for some time, burning high up on the mountain-sides and suddenly going out. There seems to be some anti-American sentiment among the powers that be, and only last week matters came to a crisis by the Government putting an embargo on the business of one of the largest houses here, in which an American is a partner. Smuggled silk was discovered coming ashore at night, supposedly from the Esmeralda, and as that steamer was consigned to the firm in question, the authorities demanded payment of a fine of $30,000. Our friends refused, the [219]officials closed the doors of their counting-room, our consul cabled to Japan for war-ships again, the Governor-General read the telegram, hasty summons were given to the parties concerned, heated arguments followed, and the matter was finally smoothed over on the surface.
 
But there seems to be a distinct feeling against us, and we have been instructed from home to prepare to leave—making arrangements to turn our business into the hands of an English firm, who will act as agents after our departure.
 
September 20th.
 
The cable has come, and we hope by next month to leave this land of intrigue and iniquity. It has treated me well, but complications are daily appearing in the business world, and if we get away without suddenly being dragged into some civil dispute it will be delightful.
 
I am glad to have been here these two years nearly, but it is time to thicken up one’s blood again in cooler climes, and I feel these fair islands are no place for the permanent residence of an American. We seem to be like fish out of water here in the Far East, and as few in numbers. The Englishman and the German are everywhere, and why shouldn’t they be? Their home-roosts are too small for them to perch upon, and they are born with the instinct to fly from their nests [220]to some foreign land. But, America is so big that we ought not to feel called upon to swelter in the tropics amid the fevers and the ferns, and I, for one, am content to “keep off the grass” of these distant foreign colonies.
 
Paseo de la Luneta, where the Band Played, the Breezes Blew, and Manila Aired Herself Each Afternoon.
Paseo de la Luneta, where the Band Played, the Breezes Blew, and Manila Aired Herself Each Afternoon.
 
See page 18.
 
The Englishman or German comes out here on a five-years’ contract, and generally runs up a debit balance the first year that keeps him busy economizing the other four. At the end of his first season, he wishes he were at home. At the end of the second, he has exhausted all the novelties of the new situation. At the close of the third, he has settled down to humdrum life. At the end of the fourth, he has become completely divorced from home habits and modern ideals. And at the close of the fifth, he goes home a true Filipino, though thinking all the while he is glad to get away. He says he is never coming back, but wiser heads know better. He has heard about America, and goes home via the States, to see Niagara and New York. But his first laundry-bill in San Francisco so scatters those depreciated silver “Mexicans,” which have lost half their value in being turned into gold, that he takes the fast express to the Atlantic coast, and leaves our shores by the first steamer. At home, his friends have all got married or had appendicitis, and the bustle of London, the raw rain-storms of the cold weather and the conventionality of [221]life all bring up memories of the Philippines, which now seem to lie off there in the China Sea surrounded by a halo. And so, before a year is out, he renews his contract, and at the end of a twelvemonth goes sailing back Manilaward to take up the careless life where he left it, ............