RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
accepted with some philosophy, but it was a plain massacre of a company of defenceless men by many times their number who had gotten into the town with the consent of the American authorities, and in conspiracy with the local headman and the native parish priest, on the pretext of bringing in for surrender a band of insurrectos.
The man, Lucban, who was in command of the Samar ladrones who committed this atrocity, is now a prominent politico in Manila, and it is interesting to know that only last year, in a campaign speech, he referred with dramatic intensity to "our glorious victory of Balangiga." He was appealing to an ignorant electorate, many of whom, as he knew, wore the scar of the awful Katipunan "blood pact," but it is just to record that the average Filipino is not proud of the Balangiga "victory."
Shortly before these unhappy events my sister Maria was called back to America by the illness of our mother, and I was left to face the tragic excitements of the month of September without her comforting companionship. By October I began to feel that I would have to get out of the Philippine Islands or suffer a nervous breakdown, so my husband and I agreed that it would be well for me to "run up to China," as they express it out there. Running up to China at that time of year meant getting out of tropic heat into bracing autumn weather with a nip of real winter in it, and there was nothing that I needed more.
Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Moses were both anxious to see something of China before leaving the Orient, and as this seemed an excellent opportunity to make the trip, they decided to go with me. The Boxer Insurrection had just been suppressed and the Dowager Empress had not yet returned from the West, whither she had fled during the siege of Peking. We were used to the alarums of war and we thought we were likely to see more of China "from the in-
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