RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
short, but spacious hardwood stairway into a wide central hall which opened out on a tile floored verandah, overlooking the Bay and running the entire width of the house. This verandah was enclosed by sliding windows divided into panes about six inches square, not any two of which were the same colour. All the other windows in the house were made of beautiful, translucent pearl-shell in four inch sections—more like screens than windows—which let in the light and kept out the glare, but on the verandah the architect had tried to surpass himself, with the result that royal purple, orange, pink, bright blue and green glass disclosed to one a multi-coloured and distracting stretch of otherwise beautiful bay. The hard white light was a thousand times more bearable than such a kaleidoscope, and after I got home those windows were seldom closed.
On either side of the broad central hall were two large rooms; one the dining-room, the others commodious bedrooms; while over the porte-cochère was a small drawing-room. Downstairs were the baths and three large rooms and a duplicate of the upstairs verandah. This part of the house, which was dry and well-built, I forthwith turned over to the children.
Some of the furniture was very fine; big hardwood tables and old Spanish pieces made from the beautiful woods of the Islands, but everything was greatly in need of the polisher’s brush and chamois. The floors, alternating, broad, hand hewn planks of nara and ipil were as fine as any I ever saw, though they, too, needed long and painstaking attention. In the bedrooms were high canopied and mosquito-netted beds with cane bottoms, exactly like cane-bottomed chairs, and without mattresses. Everything else was wicker.
The thing which caught my attention first, however, were the fans. My husband had written me, with great pride and satisfaction, that he had put in electric fans, and that
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