This time there was no difficulty about his passport and no need that he should, like an escaping criminal, steal at night from the city. The responsible powers were but too glad to have him go. He sailed from Manila on February 28, 1888, going first to Hong-Kong. There and in the neighboring city of Macao he visited and talked with many refugees and exiles of 1872, annus hystericus in Philippine history. By deportation or flight that year the islands had lost hundreds of their best minds and ablest servitors. That many of these were afterward proved to have had nothing to do with the uprising for which they were banished or hunted is superfluous evidence of the mad psychology of the time. In most of these cases there were no trials, no investigations, no queries. Some one frenzied with fear imagined the man across the street to be behaving in a way that indicated conspiracy; to the Ladrones with him! Some one else saw two men in the street salute each other with suspicious gravity; the next morning both were on their way to the Carolines. [99] The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura was denounced and spent the rest of his life in loneliness at Macao. It was the Lion’s Mouth and the cachets of the Bastile, revived for the astonished instruction of the age of steam. Cases are in the records of men that were seen carrying home bundles—fish, maybe, or steak. “Bombs!” cried the officers, under the sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty. Such was the lot, in fact, of most of the men deported. One of them, a learned lawyer, the ornament of the Philippine bar, as innocent of the conspiracy as the premier of Spain himself, was twenty years later picking up the crumbs of a living by trying to practise a little Spanish law in London. [100] It is to be assumed that conversation with such men did nothing to soften Rizal’s spirit or to cool his ardor of service. They were the living monuments to the hopeless incapacity of the existing System to govern or to advance. From his days and nights in their company he passed to Japan, where in the space of one month he achieved the almost incredible feat of mastering the Japanese language. But for the testimony of the facts the hardiest biographer would scarce dare the assertion. Rizal came to Japan with scarce a word of Japanese; he remained but one month; before he departed he was speaking it so well that the natives thought he was a countryman of theirs, and he was acting as their interpreter. Thereafter he could speak and write Japanese as readily as English or German.