He always had an orchestra ready for congratulating and serenading the governors, judges, and other officials on their name-days and birthdays, at the birth or death of a relative, and in fact at every variation from the usual monotony.

For such occasions he would secure laudatory poems and hymns in which were celebrated "the kind and loving governor," "the brave and courageous judge for whom there awaits in heaven the palm of the just," with many other things of the same kind.
He was the president of the rich guild of mestizos in spite of the protests of many of them, who did not regard him as one of themselves.

In the two years that he held this office he wore out ten frock coats, an equal number of high hats, and half a dozen canes.

The frock coat and the high hat were in evidence at the Ayuntamiento, in the governor-general's palace, and at military headquarters; the high hat and the frock coat might have been noticed in the cockpit, in the market, in the processions, in the Chinese shops, and under the hat and within the coat might have been seen the perspiring Capitan Tiago, waving his tasseled cane, directing, arranging, and throwing everything into disorder with marvelous activity and a gravity even more marvelous.
So the authorities saw in him a safe man, gifted with the best of dispositions, peaceful, tractable, and obsequious, who read no books or newspapers from Spain, although he spoke Spanish well.

Indeed, they rather looked upon him with the feeling with which a poor student contemplates the worn-out heel of his old shoe, twisted by his manner of walking.