There are about twenty rooms on the one floor, all of them good sized and some of them enormous, and it took a great many servants to keep the place in order. The floors were all of beautiful hardwoods and it required a permanent force of six muchachos to keep them in a proper state of polish. The Filipino method of polishing floors is interesting. Your muchacho ties either banana leaves or some sort of bags on his bare feet, then he skates up and down, up and down, until the floors get so slick that he himself can hardly stand up on them. It is easy to imagine that six boys skating together in the spaciousness of the Palace might cut fancy figures and have a delightful time generally, if they thought they were unobserved. Filipinos of the muchacho class always play like children, no matter what they are doing, and they have to be treated like children.

The Palace furniture, which must have been very fine in Spanish days, was of red narra, or Philippine mahogany, handsomely carved and displaying on every piece the Spanish coat-of-arms. But during the changing Spanish regimes someone with a bizarre taste had covered all the beautiful wood with a heavy coat of black paint. The effect was depressingly sombre to me.

The porcelain, however, or what was left of it, was unusually good. The Spanish coat-of-arms in beautiful colours was reproduced on each plate against a background of a dark blue canopy. I must say there were quite as many reminders of Spanish authority as I could wish for and I frequently felt that some noble Don might walk in at any moment and catch me living in his house.