The garden was on show the next morning, displaying beans,
tomatoes, cotton, perhaps other things that I failed to recognize
or have forgotten, anyway, a sufficient garden. There is besides an
exchange here for the sale of native wares.
One of our party had ridden a white pony, and was much amused, as
were all of us, to receive an offer for his tail! There is nothing
else the Ilongots hold in higher estimation than white horse-hair,
and here was a pony with a tail full of it! But the offer was refused;
the idea of cutting off the tail was not to be entertained for one
moment. Certainly, he might keep its tail: what they wanted was the
hair. Would he sell the hair? No; that was only a little less bad
than to sell the tail itself.
On our way back to the shack in which some of us were to sleep (the
school-house it was) we noticed an admiring crowd standing around the
pony, tethered under the house, and all unconscious of the admiration
he was exciting, most rudely presenting his hind-quarters to his
admirers. But that was not his intention; the crowd--half women,
by the way--wanted to be as close to the tail as possible.
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