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The professor speaks these words in vulgar dialect. To confuse the letters p and f in speaking Spanish was a common error among uneducated Filipinos. Tr. No cristianos, not Christians, i.e., savages. Tr. The patron saint of Spain, St. James. Tr. Houses of bamboo and nipa, such as form the homes of the masses of the natives. Tr.
"Tell our friend from across the purple ocean how we use the bamboo and the nipa plants, for other purposes besides building," remarked little Fil. Moro continued: "From the sap of the nipa palm, we distill alcohol. From the hollow bamboo we make pipes for carrying water. We boil the tender new shoots of bamboo, and eat them like celery.
In such houses there are usually large windows, without sash of course, which are shaded by day and closed by night and in severe storms by a hinged awning of nipa, seen in the photographs.
In the few cases where the houses were fitted with sides, strips of nipa palm fastened together with rattan were used. There seemed to be no uniform type of dwelling, each house differing from its neighbor in number of rooms, floor levels, or in other respects. Only one feature, the elevated sleeping platform at one end of the house, was always found.
The native dwellings are constructed of bamboo, thatched with the leaves of the nipa palm. "Glass windows are not used here; but the flat shell of a large oyster is substituted for glass, and the sashes all slide horizontally. Both of these departures from ordinary methods are said to be to exclude the great heat; but I confess that I cannot see it.
The irreverent considered him a fool, the poor regarded him as a heartless and cruel exploiter of misery and want, and his inferiors saw in him a despot and a tyrant. As to the women, ah, the women! Accusing rumors buzzed through the wretched nipa huts, and it was said that wails and sobs might be heard mingled with the weak cries of an infant.
At San Francisco the crowd was greater than at Tayug; and here was set out for us another sumptuous tiffin, in a house built the day before for this very purpose, of bamboo and nipa palm.
He skirted in his little craft the wall of tangled verdure, keeping in the dead water close to the bank where the spreading nipa palms nodded their broad leaves over his head as if in contemptuous pity of the wandering outcast.
The sago tree is a palm, thicker and larger than the cocoa-nut tree, although rarely so tall, and having immense pinnate spiny leaves, which completely cover the trunk till it is many years old. It has a creeping root-stem like the Nipa palm, and when about ten or fifteen years of age sends up an immense terminal spike of flowers, after which the tree dies.
"I also notice a curved deck or covering, laid over the boats," I said. "Yes, that is a roof, or thatch, made out of nipa palm leaves tied on to bamboo sticks," Fil explained. "Please look!" said sweet little Filippa. "Out there on the purple ocean is a more wonderful boat still." I looked. Oddest of sights! A boat shaped like a long leaf was scudding before the wind.
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