senorita knows another senorita-or senor-is just behind her, and it is amusing to see the furtive kicks she gives her sweeping train, and the sly pulls and pats she bestows on her wide sleeves or the flower in her elaborate coiffure as she slowly moves along.

But church-going is not her only recreation, though it is actually her chief diversion. She enjoys a cock-fight quite as much as do her male relatives, and there is always a goodly sprinkling of petticoats in the crowd that forms a ring around the feathered pugilists. Nor are the fair ones far behind their brothers in the matter of bets, cheerfully risking the price of a month's finery and often the finery itself on the result. It is by no means an uncommon sight to see brace

lets, rings, and other trinkets changing hands when these lilliputian duels are over. There is a strain of sporting blood in every man, woman and child in the archipelago and a Manila woman will bet her bracelets, brooch, cherished earrings, and even the gown on her back, though never her fan. Without that she is shorn of half her power to charm. The fans used by the poorer classes are flimsy things of gaudy paper, or big Spanish ones, bearing highly colored pictures of bull-fights, but those carried by wealthy dames are elegant trifles of painted pina lace, or spangled black satin, or marvellously carved sandalwood, wafting delicious faint fragrance with every languid movement of the fair owner's wrist. That wrist is always

musical with many bracelets, usually of silver, and sometimes set with semiprecious stones such as garnets, turquoises, and olivines. The rich wear massive bands of gold and strings of native pearls, often rudely polished and flawed, but of high lustre and a delicate pink tint extremely lovely against a youthful neck. One expects to see coral beads in plenty, but very little coral is to be had in the islands. Every woman, rich or poor, old or young, owns a rosary, of course, and it is always as handsome as her means will allow. The

A TYPE OF THE FAST SET

fashion, being an exact copy of her gayly attired mother.

Masculine Manila is not troubled with milliners' bills at Easter, for feminine Manila tucks a rose in her jetty tresses and goes to mass or market without other head-covering. Two or three times a week she treats her abundant locks to the cooling luxury of a lemon shampoo, but just what beneficial effect. it is supposed to have on the hair I have. never been able to learn.

A little belle on her way to mass will sometimes throw a scrap of lace over her pretty head, but this is more a bit of coquetry than a custom. On very ceremonious occasions she may wear a fringed shawl of feather-light silk like a mantilla. Several of these shawls are found in every pretentious wardrobe; they come in the palest of blue, pink, yellow, and sea-foam green, and are as thin and airy as are the webs woven from "the spider's most attenuated thread."

"That fierce light which beats upon a throne" brought out no serious blemishes in the fair personality of Marie Antoinette during the four years she held the rank of Dauphine. She ripened from year to year, surprising even the fondly exacting Mercy d'Argenteau by her quick transitions from winning but enigmatic girlishness, to an almost startling double of her diplomatic mother, the crafty head of the house of Hapsburg. Under Mercy's promptings she gained such command of her impulses, that she could pass hours with her complotting kinsfolk without betraying the slightest evidence of the distrust that now made their intriguing ineffectual. The development of the maid of fourteen into the balanced demoiselle of eighteen, was dimly understood by her entourage and vaguely characterized in the appreciative sketch Madame de Campan wrote of her mistress, but without the running commen

tary of Mercy's daily journal, sent to the empress, it would be difficult to-day to correlate the causes which insensibly wrought the lissome maid into the sedate monitor of a timid husband and prince.

Marie Antoinette was in after years accused so persistently of extravagance that Mercy's revelations, anent her expenditures, suggest rather the penuriousness of the bourgeoisie than the open hand of a great princess. Her income from her arrival in France to the day she ascended the throne, was just seventeen thousand dollars a year, about twenty thousand in the values of to-day. But of this relatively modest sum, she never received more than a third for her own wants, as by an indirect system of pensions, the rest went to domestics, or was really appropriated priated by the unscrupulous agents through whose hands it passed. But in her first period the Dauphine was not lavish in spending money. Mercy was