The troops defiled past the dead body, as though reviewed by it, for the most commanding figure of all was that which lay lifeless, but the center of all eyes. An officer, realizing the decency due to death, drew his handkerchief from the dead man's pocket and spread the silk over the calm face. A crimson stain soon marked the whiteness emblematic of the pure life that had just ended, and with the glorious blue overhead, the tricolor of Liberty, which had just claimed another martyr, was revealed in its richest beauty. Sir Hugh Clifford (now Governor of Ceylon), in Blackwood's Magazine, "The Story of Jose Rizal, the Filipino; A Fragment of Recent Asiatic History," comments as follows on the disgraceful doing of that day: "It was," he writes, "early morning, December 30, 1896, and the bright sunshine of the tropics streamed down upon the open space, casting hard fantastic shadows, and drenching with its splendor two crowds of sightseers. The one was composed of Filipinos, cowed, melancholy, sullen, gazing through hopeless eyes at the final scene in the life of their great countryman--the man who had dared to champion their cause, and to tell the world the story of their miseries; the other was blithe of air, gay with the uniforms of officers and the bright dresses of Spanish ladies, the men jesting and laughing, the women shamelessly applauding with waving handkerchiefs and clapping palms, all alike triumphing openly in the death of the hated 'Indian,' the 'brother of the water-buffalo,' whose insolence had wounded their pride. * * * Turning away, sick at heart, from the contemplation of this bitter tragedy, it is with a thrill of almost vindictive satisfaction that one remembers that less than eighteen months later the Luneta echoed once more to the sound of a mightier fusillade--the roar of the great guns with which the battle of Manila Bay was fought and won. * * * And if in the moment of his last supreme agony the power to probe the future had been vouchsafed to Jose Rizal, would he not have died happy in the knowledge that the land he loved so dearly was very soon to be transferred into such safekeeping?" CHAPTER XI The After-Life in Memory An hour or so after the shooting a dead-wagon from San Juan de Dios Hospital took Rizal's body to Paco Cemetery. The civil governor of Manila was in charge and there also were present the members of a Church society whose duty it was to attend executions. Rizal had been wearing a black suit which he had obtained for his European trip, and a derby hat, not only appropriate for a funeral occasion because of their somber color, but also more desirable than white both for the full day's wear, since they had to be put on before the twenty-four hours in the chapel, and for the lying on the ground which would follow the execution of the sentence. A plain box inclosed the remains thus dressed, for even the hat was picked up and encoffined.