



Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
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                                  THE
                            FRIAR'S DAUGHTER

                             A Story of the
                          American Occupation
                          of the Philippines.


                       By CHARLES LINCOLN PHIFER

              Author of "The White Sea," "The Giant Hand,"
                    "Diaz the Dictator," Etc., Etc.

              40 Cents Each. 10 for $3.00. 100 for $22.00.


                                 1909:
                       Published by C. L. PHIFER
                             Girard, Kansas







CHARACTERS.



    Judge Benjamin Daft, American Governor.
    Admiral Rainey, Conqueror of the Philippines.
    Camillo Saguanaldo, Insurgent General and President.
    Bishop Lonzello, the Friar.
    Ambrosia Lonzello, the Friar's Daughter.
    Rodriguez Violeta, the Papal Nuncio.
    Mrs. Rizal, widow of a Filipino Patriot.
    Maximo Voliva, Leader of a Schism.


Time--1898-1899. Place--Manila and Vicinity.







JUST A WORD.


This is a story founded on truth. Practically every incident told
about really happened; yet some liberty has been taken with the
arrangements of these incidents into a story. Events are sometimes
grouped outside of their natural order and place of occurrence,
and the time of action is shortened. Conversation is necessarily
invented, and is used to bring out the setting of the story and give
it life. Another thing: Every writer recognizes that it is desirable
to not have too many characters in a story, and to not drag it through
unimportant incidents. Therefore, I have omitted many incidents of
the occupation of the Philippines, and have in places ascribed to one
person, in an effort to keep down the number of characters, acts which
properly belonged to other persons, so that some of the characters
are representative and composite. To illustrate my meaning--that a
love story in the simplest form might run through the tale I have
made Saguanaldo appear as a lover as well as a general, though this
is acknowledged to be fiction. In other places I have one character
doing a work that was really done by a different person; but it
would have been difficult and confusing to use all the actors in the
stirring drama or to refer to all the many incidents. This shortening
of the period of action, and this combining in one person the deeds of
several, is something which Shakespeare did in his historical dramas;
so that this is historical in the same sense that some of his plays
are historical--not as to the truth of every word and the time and
place of every act, but in spirit and in incident. The truth is there,
but the grouping is made to meet the author's need.

There is no personal bias in this work. It is nothing to the author
that in this case the center of the plot hinges about churchmen. It
is no more than if it should center around secular affairs. It is the
old story of personal ambition which has appeared in a thousand forms
and has influenced all conditions of people. It is not a matter of
religion or irreligion, but a picture of what ambition will do for
even the best of aims and men.


                                                                C. L. P.







THE FRIAR'S DAUGHTER.

I.

"AND THE SUN COMES UP LIKE THUNDER."


Up till midnight Manila was at play. In mediæval Luzon they had not
then lost the sportive instinct of the healthy animal or been lost
in the chase of the dollar. The shops were closed, but the places of
amusement were open. The Lunita, outside the city wall, was thronged
with carriages, and at each end of the Plaza de Gotta a band was
playing. Spanish grandees and beautiful donnas were driving or
promenading there. Inside the wall churches and theatres were open,
the churches being first visited and then the play houses. In the
amphitheater, built up of bamboo, a crowd of the poorer people were
gathered, and while the braver battles were not in progress at this
time, cock fighting was attracting the attention of many. Under the
walls of the old city, the city that best represented the ancient
order, the city of this story, in cloisters arched over where stock
was being housed, groups of men were throwing dice or playing cards. It
was like a picture of the middle ages projected into the closing days
of April, 1898.

What an anomaly it was! Walls of the middle ages, surrounded by a
great moat, and within a cosmopolitan group, including Spaniards,
Chinese and natives of the Northern islands; yet adjoining it to
the east lay a modern city; and Cavite, eight miles to the west,
was a fort manned by modern guns. Yellow clay houses of one and two
stories roofed with red tile, some with courts in the center, here
in old Manila, and to the east modern places of business and houses
well plumbed, lighted with electricity. Churches and cathedrals,
conventos and nunneries everywhere here, and beyond the Passig river
modern amusement places and Protestant churches.

In the magnificent harbor that lay north of Manila, small crafts
of many kinds were grouped at the piers, and in the distance the
modern fleet of Spain lay at anchor. It was the one portion of the
old order that yet remained; and the world was pressing upon it,
and change was near.

Ambrosia Lonzello, the Friar's Daughter, stood at the gate in front
of her mother's home, gazing down the street, dreaming the dreams of
oriental maidenhood. She had inherited the symmetry of proportion that
belonged to her mother's tribe in Cebu, and from her father, Bishop
Lonzello, had the Spaniard's dark eyes and charming vivacity. It had
been twenty years since Friar Lonzello, a young priest then located
in Cebu, had met the young native woman who became Ambrosia's mother;
and though it was forbidden priests to marry, Lonzello yet supported
the woman he had then loved and the daughter that had been born to
them. If it was a strange thing to a European, it was rather the
rule than the exception in that oriental, mediaeval country, and as
the daughter of the Bishop, Ambrosia was one of the prominent young
women of the walled city. She stood, gazing down the street and up
at the stars, dreaming her own dreams, a girl without experience in
the ways of the world, when she heard a voice at her side:

"Ambrosia! Buenos dias!" [1]

Ambrosia started. She knew the voice. But she supposed the possessor,
Camillo Saguanaldo, was across the bay in China. A few months before
he had been banished because of leading an insurrection against the
friars, who were practically the rulers of the Philippines, and his
return involved great danger for him. So Ambrosia said:

"I thought you were in China, Camillo. Do you not know it is dangerous
for you to be in Luzon?"

"My duty calls me here, Ambrosia, and here I must be,"