With Tiago the lifting of the ban upon Ibarra makes no difference; he is still anathema to the all-powerful orders. The campaign for Linares and against Ibarra is waged vigorously with the aid of many candles on many shrines and the promises of many bombs. At fiestas, it should be explained, the custom was to burn great quantities of fireworks by day and night; and the piety of the devout, as expressed in squibs, crackers, rockets, pin-wheels, and bombs, was supposed to insure their salvation. In this form of divine worship, the friars had a commercial interest; it may be believed that if a doubt of its perfect efficacy occurred to them they managed to master it. Under the Spanish social system, Philippine maidens of all complexions married whomsoever their parents told them to marry and silenced their objections, if they had any; hence, in the Tiago household the preparations for the marriage of Maria Clara and the half-witted Linares are urged with a sweet confidence. Maria Clara herself contributes the only flaw in these proceedings. She falls desperately ill. News of her condition is brought to Ibarra by the person in the book called “the Pilot Elias,” who is one of the pivots on which the narrative turns. It was Elias that warned Ibarra of the plot to crush out his life with the corner-stone. In a picnic fishing expedition Ibarra had saved Elias from the jaws of a cayman (crocodile) and Elias had sworn his gratitude. He is evidently much above his caste, which is that of a boatman; he has had an education. In and out of the story he flits mysteriously until his true vocation is revealed; he is a man with a history, a victim of the prevailing despotism, forced by his sufferings to ponder the ills of his people and become at last a secret, restless, wary, and intelligent agitator against the System of his day. It is through him that Rizal voices his protests. As the plot unfolds, Ibarra wins Elias’ story. We shall repeat it here, but with a preface of warning. In these times, the average reader, the more if he is an American, will look upon the tale as a wild extravagance, so easily are the conditions of one generation obliterated in the next, and so difficult is it to believe the life of one country is not like the life of all countries. Yet what Elias is fabled here to have told Ibarra might have been taken with changes of names from veritable records. Exactly these things happened in the Philippine Islands in the nineteenth century, even in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They happened in many regions and to many persons. Still worse things happened, if worse can be conceived; for lust and greed and reversion ran savage riot under two conditions that have always been hothouses for such growths: autocracy, and distance from the world’s observation. ELIAS’ STORY