Note 21 — Chapter II · SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS

With a girl older than he was and already engaged to another. She seems to have been something of a flirt. A few years afterward he wrote (apparently for himself) an account of his feelings and sufferings in those days. Mariano Ponce, his friend and confidant, published the document in the “Revista Filipina,” December, 1916. It shows Rizal to have been a poetical and dreamy lover. When he discovered the hopeless nature of his attachment he wandered alone in the woods, given up to a melancholy conviction of misfortune, but recovered in time to fall in love again and learn the reality of his forebodings. ↑