Note (return) — Chapter IV

I have presented to you, reader, a man of deep culture, known and respected in the highest circles, and yet inseparably connected with his race and religion, and ready to offer his life for their welfare; a man who worked with might and main for others at the sacrifice of his own comfort and advancement; an orator whose exalted phrases shattered the pillars and foundations of ignorance and superstition; a hero who in time of peril was proof against the arrows and missiles of the enemy, and who did not relax his hand from the flag. But what was the fruit he reaped? Mostly ingratitude and persecution, a heart lacerated with despair, a soul writhing under the pangs of frustrated hopes. Such a personality with its fine shades, and with the poetry of the artist superimposed, would afford splendid material for the hero of a novel—a hero to captivate the eye and heart of the reader by his nobility and grandeur.15