The World in a Train 2

The World In A Train

"Mang Kiko" Francisco B. Icasiano

One Sunday I entrained for Baliwag, a town in Bulacan which can well afford to hold two fiestas a year without a qualm.

I took the train partly because I am prejudiced in favor of the government-owned
railroad, partly because I am allowed comparative comfort in a coach, and finally because trains sometimes leave and arrive according to schedule.

In the coach I found a little world, a section of the abstraction called humanity whom we are supposed to love and live for. I had previously arranged to divide the idle hour or so between cultivating my neglected Christianity and smoothing out the rough edges of my nature with the aid of grateful sights without – the rolling wheels, the flying huts and trees and light-green palay seedlings and carabaos along the way.

Inertia, I suppose, and the sort of reality we moderns know make falling in love with my immediate neighbors often a matter of severe strain and effort to me.

Series Of Essay
"I Am A Filipino"   by Carlos P. Romulo
I am a Filipino – inheritor of a glorious past, hostage to the uncertain future.   As such, I must prove equal to a two-fold task – the task of meeting my responsibility to the past, and the task of performing my obligation to the future.
I am sprung from a hardy race – child many generations removed of ancient Malayan pioneers.   Across the centuries, the memory comes rushing back to me: of brown-skinned men putting out to sea in ships that were as frail as their hearts were stout.   Over the sea I see them come, borne upon the billowing wave and the whistling wind, carried upon the mighty swell of hope – hope in the free abundance of the new land that was to be their home and their children’s forever.
This is the land they sought and found.   Every inch of shore that their eyes first set upon, every hill and mountain that beckoned to them with a green and purple invitation, every mile of rolling plain that their view...