SEÑOR MAESTRO, TYRANT AND DARKEST DESPOT:--When you will receive this note I will be gone and out of the reach of your most unjust, tyrannic and unholy arm. I am embarking at the present time upon a banca, I will take a lorcha at the dismouthing of the Ilog River to Ilo-Ilo and from that charming city I will go to Manila to study typewriting and thus enable me to enter the Administration of the Government of this my sore-tried and much in the past tyrannized and devastated country which will rise like the phenix bird from its cinders, blooming afresh from the long-sleeping volcano when it awakes and lights up the world with the blessings of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which to my ignorant countrymen I will teach like the swallow which none die without God on High knowing it feed his little young one that do not know how to flie above the dark ignorance at the all-around of them. It gives me great pleasure, oh, sir, to proclamate to you that the unholy union in which you like the blackest czar of despotic Russia forced upon my palpitating heart is null. My father who has returned from his hacienda tells me that according to the law I cannot marry without his permission until I am twenty-five. I am only twenty and my father--Oh, sir, how sweetly paternal is a father--will not permit me to marry Señorita Constancia de la Rama y Lacson, so my so-called marriage is a void. Hoping sir, that Remorse will soon cause your heart to weep I am No longer your pupil and assistant-maestro MAURO LEDESMA Y GOLES. "Thunder!" exclaimed the Maestro, suddenly again belligerent. "Let's get after him!" But the Maestra had picked up the letter and was reading it. "Oh," she said, when she had finished; "oh, that is very nice. Now I can--what you call?--ah, divorce; I can divorce--just like an American girl!" And thus it is that the Girls' School of Balangilang is still the envy of the maestros for leagues around. VII A JEST OF THE GODS It was rather a disreputable place, and really we were there by chance, a dance upon the British warship anchored near Cavité and the breakdown of the returning launch leaving us upon the stone quay of the Binondo _estero_ at a shameful hour. The time spent bobbing upon the waters while with fervent ejaculations the engineer experimented with the frivolous gasoline engine had been ecstatically cool. Now the city exhaled upon us her feverish breath, in a short time the sun would pour down its blistering rays, and we could not bear thought of room and bed. So we sat around the big narra table at Timke's, clinking with straws the ice in our glasses.