Bonifacio, at least, had no idea of waiting until the Philippines should be populated with university graduates able to demonstrate in scholarly phrases the philosophical sweetness of liberty. Desiring freedom, he desired it then and there. Month by month, the Katipunan spread and carried with it, as a flood carries a straw, the catastrophe of this story. At Dapitan life went on unchangingly. It is likely that Rizal had there a happiness and a serenity he had not known since childhood. He says as much in one of his letters: My life now is quiet, peaceful, retired, and without glory; but I think it is useful, too. I teach here the poor but intelligent boys reading, Spanish, English, mathematics, and geometry. Moreover, I teach them to behave like men. I taught the men here how to get a better way of earning their living, and they think I am right. We have begun, and already success has crowned our trials. He tells how even in that out-of-the-way place there were lessons for him to learn; how he was taught there to steer and reef, to manage a canoe, to speak Visayan, and the better to know his own country. “God can send you your fortune,” he adds, “even amidst the persecutions of your friends!” In this letter he dwells with a kind of delight on his exacting labors in philology, of his studies in Tagalog and his Tagalog grammar, which he had almost completed. It is plainly to be seen that his activities kept him from nostalgia, as his captivity from the turmoil of his years in the noisy and bitter world; and now he was happily married! But man is not so easily separated from his Nemesis. Of a sudden all this house of content fell in ruins about him. All this time he was maintaining his correspondence with his friends, the European scientists, and particularly with Dr. Blumentritt, [199] the closest and most sympathetic of his intellectual allies. Early in 1896 a letter from Dr. Blumentritt told him of the sad condition of the hospitals in Cuba. Yellow fever was raging in the Island, and there were not nearly enough physicians to meet the emergency. No such report could be made to Rizal without awakening in him his sympathy and instinctive impulse to help whomsoever might be in distress. He wrote to the governor-general offering to go to Cuba as a volunteer physician in the government hospitals. There was a new governor-general now; Despujol had ended his clouded career and gone home. Governor-General Blanco accepted Rizal’s offer, and on August 1, 1896, the exile sailed from Dapitan for Manila. With him went Mrs. Rizal and his little niece.