One morning in December the steamer _Tabo_ was laboriously ascending
the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers
toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer,
almost round, like the _tabú_ from which she derived her name,
quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and
grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great
affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the
fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country,
representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was
not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable,
which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly
contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the
happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably
considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State,
constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of _Reverendos_
and _Ilustrísimos_....

Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river
sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks,
there she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds
of smoke--the Ship of State, so the joke runs, also has the vice of
smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding
like a tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on board
can hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she
looks as though she would grind to bits the _salambaw_, insecure
fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of
giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight
toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures,