open waterway to Manila and the outside world. Around it flourish
the green rice-fields, while Mount Makiling towers majestically near
in her moods of cloud and sunshine, overlooking the picturesque
curve of the shore and the rippling waters of the lake. Shadowy
to the eastward gleam the purple crests of Banahao and Cristobal,
and but a few miles to the southwestward dim-thundering, seething,
earth-rocking Taal mutters and moans of the world's birth-throes. It
is the center of a region rich in native lore and legend, as it sleeps
through the dusty noons when the cacao leaves droop with the heat and
dreams through the silvery nights, waking twice or thrice a week to
the endless babble and ceaseless chatter of an Oriental market where
the noisy throngs make of their trading as much a matter of pleasure
and recreation as of business.

Directly opposite this market-place, in a house facing the village
church, there was born in 1861 into the already large family of one
of the more prosperous tenants on the Dominican estate a boy who was
to combine in his person the finest traits of the Oriental character
with the best that Spanish and European culture could add, on whom
would fall the burden of his people's woes to lead him over the via
dolorosa of struggle and sacrifice, ending in his own destruction
amid the crumbling ruins of the system whose disintegration he himself
had done so much to compass.

Jose Rizal-Mercado y Alonso, as his name emerges from the confusion
of Filipino nomenclature, was of Malay extraction, with some distant
strains of Spanish and Chinese blood. His genealogy reveals several
persons remarkable for intellect and independence of character, notably
a Philippine Eloise and Abelard, who, drawn together by their common
enthusiasm for study and learning, became his maternal grandparents, as