Olatayan, and ran her nose up on the beach.  She stayed there two weeks, and was beaten up by bad weather, and assistance had to be sent to get her off.  Then she had to be pretty well rebuilt, and repainted.  At the time of all these happenings I was in Iloilo, whither I had gone for treatment of an abscess of the middle ear, and as I depended on the Blanco for getting back, felt personally injured by her antics.  I went several times to the office of her agents, one of the big English trading firms, to inquire how the wreck was getting along, and what the prospect was for a return to Capiz before Christmas.  The man at the desk did not look characteristically English, and on my first appearance I addressed him tentatively in Spanish.  He answered in that language, and we continued to use it.  On one of the later visits this gentleman was not visible, but in his place a red-headed, freckled youth, with the map of Scotland outlined on his rugged countenance, presided over the collection of inkstands and ledgers.  Naturally, I accosted him in English, whereupon the shape of my former interlocutor rose up from behind a screen and remarked, “By Jove, I thought you were Spanish, don’t you know? and have been talking to you all this time in Spanish.  What a sell!”

Failing the Blanco, I took passage for Capiz on the Fritz, a craft one or two degrees smaller and rustier than the old General.  Of all the weird experiences I ever had, that twenty-four hours was the weirdest.  They cleared out a sort of pantry or lazaretto just back of the deck engine-house for me to use as a stateroom, and I slept on the pantry shelf.  Some kind of steam pipes must have passed under it, for it grew so hot that several times I had to vacate and get down on the floor.  Then we met a little wind as we rounded the north coast, and I was sick.  A family of Filipino aristocrats came on board at Estancia, and the ladies elected to share my retreat.  They had several servants and one or two babies and other necessaries of life, and they left me only a corner of the pantry shelf, against which I propped my weary and seasick frame.  We made Capiz just at dusk, and never was a wanderer more eager to see home.  There on the bank were two of my friends, who said they were invited out to dinner and were to bring me if I arrived in time.  So we went to that cheery American home with its spotless linen, its silver and china.  For six weeks I had been living on Spanish “chow,” and the contrast made me serenely happy.  It was almost worth enduring—­the six weeks of chow and the Fritz, I mean—­to enjoy the change.