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.