patients from
abroad, drawn here by his fame as an oculist. Among these last came
a Mr. Taufer, a resident of Hong-Kong, and with him his foster-child,
Josephine Bracken, the daughter of an Irish sergeant. The pretty and
adventurous girl and the banished patriot fell in love with each other.

These may well have been among the happiest years of Rizal's
life. He had always been an exile in fact: now that he was one in
name, strangely enough he was able for the first time to live in
peace among his brothers under the skies he loved. He sang, in his
pathetic content:

"Thou dear illusion with thy soothing cup!
I taste, and think I am a child again.

Oh! kindly tempest, favoring winds of heaven,
That knew the hour to check my shifting flight,
And beat me down upon my native soil,..."

Always about his philological studies, he began here a work that
should be of peculiar interest to us: a treatise on Tagalog verbs, in
the English language. Did his knowledge of America's growing feeling
toward Cuba lead him to foresee--as no one else seems to have done--her
appearance in the Philippines, or was he thinking of England?

At Hong-Kong, and in his brief stays at Manila, Rizal had established
the Liga Filipina, a society of educated and progressive islanders,
whose ideas of needed reforms and methods of attaining them were at
one with his own. His banishment was a warning of danger and checked
the society's activity.

The Liga was succeeded, in the sense only of followed, by the
Katipunan,--a native word also meaning league. The makers of this
"league," though avowing the same purpose as the members of the other,
were men of very different stamp. Their initiation was a blood-rite:
they sought immediate independence; they preached a campaign of force,
if not of violence. That a recent reviewer should have connected
Dr. Rizal's name with the Katipunan is difficult to understand. Not
alone are his writings, acts, and character against such a possibility,
but so also is the testimony of the Spanish archives: for not only
was it admitted at his final trial that he was not suspected of any
connection with the Katipunan, but his well-known disapproval of that
society's premature and violent action was even made a point against
him. He was so much the more dangerous to the state because he had the
sagacity to know that the times were not yet ripe for independence,
and the honesty and purity of purpose to m