But while he was still waiting on the Castilla in the harbor disaster had begun to ripen for him. The whole Katipunan conspiracy was laid bare to the Government. According to the accepted story, on the night of August 19, the mother superior of a convent-school at Tondo burst upon the parish priest at his house with information that she had discovered a terrible plot to massacre all the Spaniards in the Islands. A brother of one of her pupils was a member of the Katipunan. Assessments upon members of the order had now become frequent, as Bonifacio’s preparations drew to a head. It is an ancient Filipino custom for the woman in each household to keep the purse for the men. This young man’s treasurer was his sister. Of late he had been coming to her so often for funds that she insisted upon knowing what he wanted the money for. Then little by little she wormed his secret from him and fled with it to the mother superior, who took it to the padre. Father Gil seems to have made one leap with the news to the Civil Guard, who arrested the girl’s brother, forced a confession from him (probably with tortures), and, taking the priest in tow, went to the place that the youth had said was the printing-office of the Katipunan. There they found, or said they found, incriminating documents that revealed the plot. [202] Or some plot. At the best of times, as we have seen, hysteria in the governing class of Manila slept on a hair-trigger, and, being once awakened, offered a credulity more than childlike to the most grotesque creations of the most unhealthy imagination. On this occasion its manifestations were of the worst. Such wild tales as flew about the city in those days, and had the approval of grave men that must have known better, were fit only for a group of children telling ghost-stories in the dark. That in the middle of the night armed bands of ferocious, horrible natives were to steal upon the innocent repose of every white person and slit his throat from ear to ear as he slept, was the least terrifying of these rumors, and the earliest fruitage of an aroused and exotic fancy. Curiously enough, it had no merit in originality, but was wan and hoary with age; for one hundred and fifty years, at every revolt of the overtaxed natives, it had been brought out and paraded. It even persisted to a later day and was used to frighten adult Americans that might have been deemed beyond such melodrama. Certain plans required American dislike of the Filipinos, and thus the dislike was to be engendered. In the present instance, it can hardly be necessary to say to any Filipino reader that wholesale murder was no part of Bonifacio’s plans, nor any other of the ogreish and blood-curdling designs that he was then said to have formed. That it seems needful to do him this justice before another public is only further evidence of the gross misrepresentation that interest and profits have made of all this chapter of history.