My hopes for the evening were blasted. About five o’clock the heavens opened and such a sheet of water descended upon my refreshment tent and my strings of gay paper lanterns as one never sees in the Temperate Zone. It was raining in torrents when our guests began to arrive, and if many of those invited had not been kept at home by the weather I don’t know what I should have done with the crowd. I had a wide hall, a small reception room, a dining-room and the verandah, but two thousand people are a good many, and I’m sure a large majority of them came in spite of the weather. It was a “crush,” and a warm, moist crush, but it was a gala occasion, everybody was in good humour and the evening passed much more pleasantly than I had any reason to expect. This was the first entertainment of such proportions that I had undertaken in Manila, and I saw at once that, as the Governor’s wife, I should need all the spaciousness of Malacañan Palace.