The life of the inhabitants of the far-away Eastern island in which the people of the United States are now so vitally interested opens to our literature an new field not less fresh and original than that which came to us when Mr. Kipling first published his Indian Tales. No less wonderful and varied are the inhabitants and the phenomena of the Philippines, and a new author, showing rare knowledge of the country and its strange peoples, now gives us a collection of simple yet powerful stories which bring them before us with dramatic vividness. -- From the foreword

Published in 1901 during the Philippine-American war. There is enough detail to suggest that the author was reasonably familiar with the Philippines to be able to describe details such as local architecture and the appearance of port towns like Dumaguete.

Mr. Kayme tells the eleven stories, and tells them cleverly, from the point of a non-Filipino looking in on Filipino life and makes no attempt to imitate Kipling. Kayme's "Anting-Anting" stories give the native Filipino of unmixed blood a place in western fiction. In the late 19th C. he was favorably compared to the North American Indian of the same era.