not only the best, but indeed the only thing to do.  Here we had chow.  We were now directly on the left bank of the Chico, and, passing on, found the country more open, and so better cultivated, the paddies being broad, the retaining-walls low, and the countryside generally wearing an air of peace and affluence.  This impression deepened as we reached Bangad, extremely well situated on a tongue running out at right angles to the main course of hills.  Here was a semblance of a street, following the trail, or, rather, the trail, going through, had followed the street.  The houses were larger, cleaner, better built; in short, substantial.  One of them, unfinished, gave us some idea of its construction:  floor sills on posts to ground; roof frame of planks, 1 x 6 inches, bent over to form the sides of the house when completed, all hard wood, without a single nail, the whole being held together by mortises and tenons and other joints, accurately made and neatly fitted.  We remained here an hour or so, while the “Commission” was making gifts to the people.  No weapons whatever were visible, and the women and children moved about freely without a trace of shyness or fear.  Our way beyond the village now took us by many turns back to the river, the trail finally rising in the side of a vertical cliff, such that by leaning over a little one could look past one’s stirrup straight down to the water many hundreds of feet below.  At the highest point the trail turned sharp to the left, almost back on itself.  I am proud to say that I rode it all, but was thankful when it was behind us.  Heiser’s horse this day got three of his feet over the edge and rolled down eighty or ninety feet, Heiser having jumped off in time to let his mount go alone.  It was fortunate for him that this particular cliff was not the scene of this fall.  Some three miles farther, on fording a stream, we passed from Bontok into Kalinga, and were met by Mr. Hale, the Governor, with two warriors, tall and slender, broad of chest and thin of flank, with red and yellow gee-strings, tufts of brilliant feathers in their hair, and highly polished head-axes on their hips.  Greetings over, we went on, and soon reached the river again, going down the left bank until we came upon what seemed to me to be a most interesting geological formation.  For the bank of the river here rose sharply in a rounded, elongated mass, the end of which toward us was cut off, as it were, just as one cuts off the end of a loaf of bread, and showed alternate thin black and white strata only three or four inches thick tilted at an angle of sixty or seventy degrees and mounting several hundred feet in the air.  The trail itself had been cut out in the side of the mass, and was so narrow that not only was everyone ordered to dismount, but the American horses were all unsaddled, the inch or two so gained being important in passing along.  The black and white strata showing on the path, there was an opportunity to examine them; the black layers