her husband's position had given her the entree.

On Sundays Rizal fenced at Juan Luna's house with his distinguished
artist-countryman, or, while the latter was engaged with Ventura,
watched their play. It was on one of these afternoons that the Tagalog
story of "The Monkey and the Tortoise"[2] was hastily sketched as a
joke to fill the remaining pages of Mrs. Luna's autograph album, in
which she had been insisting Rizal must write before all its space
was used up. A comparison of the Tagalog version with a Japanese
counterpart was published by Rizal in English, in Truebner's Magazine,
suggesting that the two people may have had a common origin. This
study received considerable attention from other ethnologists, and
was among the topics at an ethnological conference.

At times his antagonist was Miss Nellie Baustead, who had great
skill with the foils. Her father, himself born in the Philippines,
the son of a wealthy merchant of Singapore, had married a member of
the Genato family of Manila. At their villa in Biarritz, and again
in their home in Belgium, Rizal was a guest later, for Mr. Baustead
had taken a great liking to him.

The teaching instinct that led him to act as mentor to the Filipino
students in Spain and made him the inspiration of a mutual improvement
club of his young countrymen in London, suggested the foundation of
a school in Paris. Later a Pampangan youth offered him $40,000 with
which to found a Filipino college in Hongkong, where many young men
from the Philippines had obtained an education better than their
own land could afford but not entirely adapted to their needs. The
scheme attracted Rizal, and a prospectus for such an institution
which was later found among his papers not only proves how deeply
he was interested, but reveals the fact that his ideas of education
were essentially like those carried out in the present public-school
course of instruction in the Philippines.

Early in August of 1890 Rizal went to Madrid to seek redress for a
wrong done his family by the notorious General Weyler, the "Butcher"
of evil memory in Cuba, then Governor-General of the Philippines. Just
as the mother's loss of liberty, years before, was caused by revengeful
feelings on the part of an official because for one day she was obliged
to omit a customary gift of horse feed, so the father's loss of land
was caused by a revengeful official, and for quite as trivial a cause.

Mr. Mercado was a great poultry