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
well as a great-uncle who was a traveler and student and who directed
the boy's early studies. Thus from the beginning his training was
exceptional, while his mind was stirred by the trouble already brewing
in his community, and from the earliest hours of consciousness he saw
about him the wrongs and injustices which overgrown power will ever
develop in dealing with a weaker subject. One fact of his childhood,
too, stands out clearly, well worthy of record: his mother seems to
have been a woman of more than ordinary education for the time and
place, and, pleased with the boy's quick intelligence, she taught him
to read Spanish from a copy of the Vulgate in that language, which
she had somehow managed to secure and keep in her possession--the
old, old story of the Woman and the Book, repeated often enough under
strange circumstances, but under none stranger than these. The boy's
father wa