re the sands are soft and fine,
At the foot of the mount in its mantle of green;
I have found a home in the pleasant grove's confine,
In the shady woods, that peace and calmness divine,
Rest for the weary brain and silence to my sorrow keen.

The Church benefited by the presence of the exile, for he drew the
design for an elaborate curtain to adorn the sanctuary at Easter
time, and an artist Sister of Charity of the school there did the
oil painting under his direction. In this line he must have been
proficient, for once in Spain, where he traveled out of his way to
Saragossa to visit one of his former teachers of the Ateneo, who
he had heard was there, Rizal offered his assistance in making some
altar paintings, and the Jesuit says that his skill and taste were
much appreciated.

The home of the Sisters had a private chapel, for which the teachers
were preparing an image of the Virgin. For the sake of economy the
head only was procured from abroad, the vestments concealing all
the rest of the figure except the feet, which rested upon a globe
encircled by a snake in whose mouth is an apple. The beauty of the
countenance, a real work of art, appealed to Rizal, and he modeled
the more prominent right foot, the apple and the serpent's head, while
the artist Sister assisted by doing the minor work. Both curtain and
image, twenty years after their making, are still in use.

On Sundays, Father Sanchez and Rizal conducted a school for the people
after mass. As part of this education it was intended to make raised
maps in the plaza of the chief city of the eight principal islands of
the Philippines, but on account of Father Sanchez's being called away,
only one. Mindanao, was completed; it has been restored with a concrete
sidewalk and balustrade about it, while the plaza is a national park.

Among Rizal's patients was a blind American named Taufer, fairly well
to do, who had been engineer of the pumping plant of the Hongkong Fire
Department. He was a man of bravery, for he held a diploma for helping
to rescue five Spaniards from a shipwreck in Hongkong harbor. And he
was not less kind-hearted, for he and his wife, a Portuguese, had
adopted and brought up as their own the infant daughter of a poor
Irish woman who had died in Hongkong, leaving a considerable family
to her husband, a corporal in the British Army on service there.

The little girl had been educated in the Italian convent after the
first Mrs. Taufer