RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
ters a large presidencia and schoolhouse combined, while a tent was put up and rudely equipped for bathing purposes. This was luxury indeed, and we began to think that we had left all hardship behind us; but the next night, after a seven hours’ “hike” over a terrible trail, we found shelter in a miserable hut with only one room which we all had to occupy, with Igorrote blankets for partitions.
The Igorrotes grew less and less interesting as we went along and displayed few evidences of the industry and thrift which characterise the more northern tribes. The mountains are higher and the scenes are broader and more wonderful at the southern end of the range, but the only cultivation we came upon was in the villages and along the banks of the little rushing streams. It was evident that we were approaching “civilisation.” Here and there we went through small groves of coffee trees, beautiful in a wealth of snow-white blossoms, but evidently deserted, and wretchedly ragged and unkempt.
Baguio, now the summer capital of the Philippine Islands, the “Philippine Simla,” as it is so often called, lies at the top of what has become justly celebrated as “the magnificent Benguet Road,” the building of which has been the subject of more controversy than almost any other one thing that American authority and enterprise has accomplished in the Islands. The Benguet Road when I first saw it was known as “Mead’s Trail,” so named in honour of the engineer who made the original survey for it, and in some places it was nothing more than a thin line drawn against perpendicular cliffs to indicate where cutting was to be done.
Let somebody else argue the question as to whether or not this road has justified the faith of the men who built it. My husband and his colleagues were responsible for the beginning of it and Mr. Taft authorised the payment of the large sums of money which went into it, but he does not in the least object to honest criticism of the project. His only
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