Note 9 — Chapter I · A PEOPLE’S WRONGS

It was a populous household that welcomed her return; she had already borne eleven children to her husband, rearing them with an old-fashioned and sedulous care not yet out of vogue in the Philippines. Immigration had much affected the original Island strains; on both sides the family was of mixed descent. One of Mr. Mercado’s ancestors was Lam-co, a Chinaman of means and character that came to the Islands in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He settled at Biñan, was converted to Christianity, and was baptized in 1697, taking the name of Domingo. At Biñan he married the daughter of another Chinaman, whose wife was a mestiza, or half-caste Filipino. From this time on Chinese blood was mixed with Malay9 until in 1847 Francisco Mercado, descendant of Lam-co, married Teodora Alonzo, a Filipino lady of a distinguished family, partly Chinese in ancestry, and came to live at Calamba. It was her lot, twenty-five years later, to be the victim of the strange story of persecution and villainy here related.