When our still dwelling-place wraps night’s dusky mantle about her, Leaving the dead alone with the dead, to watch till the morning, Break not our rest, and seek not to lay death’s mystery open. If now and then thou shouldst hear the string of a lute or a zithern, Mine is the hand, dear country, and mine is the voice that is singing. When my tomb, that all have forgot, no cross nor stone marketh, There let the laborer guide his plow, there cleave the earth open. So shall my ashes at last be one with thy hills and thy valleys. Little ’t will matter, then, my country, that thou shouldst forget me! I shall be air in thy streets, and I shall be space in thy meadows; I shall be vibrant speech in thine ears, shall be fragrance and color, Light and shout, and loved song, for ever repeating my message. Idolized fatherland, thou crown and deep of my sorrows, Lovely Philippine Isles, once again adieu! I am leaving All with thee—my friends, my love. Where I go are no tyrants; There one dies not for the cause of his faith; there God is the ruler. Farewell, father and mother and brother, dear friends of the fireside! Thankful ye should be for me that I rest at the end of the long day. Farewell, sweet, from the stranger’s land—my joy and my comrade! Farewell, dear ones, farewell! To die is to rest from our labors! Before his murderers, before the jeers and savage exultations of the well dressed mob clamoring for his death, throughout the hearing, at the moment of the unjust verdict, he had maintained the same attitude of perfect serenity described as wonderful by all that observed it. Other condemned men have simulated this self-possession; this man had it in truth and not in seeming. Calmly he heard his condemnation, calmly he reëntered the prison where for his last night on earth quarters had been made for him in the chapel. A newspaper reporter came to interview him. He was like a prosperous and well bred host entertaining a cultured friend; [214] no eyes, however searching, could discover a joint in that perfect armor of the soul sustained and possessed, without a tremor and without a gloomy thought. To the reporter and to others that had watched him this bearing seemed not bravado but something mystical and inexplicable, but it seemed so only because the source of it was beyond their understanding. He was calm because he had long before in effect given his life to this cause and the shooting of the next day would be only the last incident in a sacrifice already made. Of this there is every indication. What men call the joy of living had since his youth meant to him the joy of serving Filipinas. He seems to have had since the day of his exile to Dapitan a feeling that in other ways his service [215] was at an end, but there remained the service of his death. All the hard tests of life