well as a great-uncle who was a traveler and student and who directed
the boy's early studies. Thus from the beginning his training was
exceptional, while his mind was stirred by the trouble already brewing
in his community, and from the earliest hours of consciousness he saw
about him the wrongs and injustices which overgrown power will ever
develop in dealing with a weaker subject. One fact of his childhood,
too, stands out clearly, well worthy of record: his mother seems to
have been a woman of more than ordinary education for the time and
place, and, pleased with the boy's quick intelligence, she taught
him to read Spanish from a copy of the Vulgate in that language,
which she had somehow managed to secure and keep in her possession--
the old, old story of the Woman and the Book, repeated often enough
under strange circumstances, but under none stranger than these. The
boy's father was well-to-do, so he was sent at the age of eight to
study in the new Jesuit school in Manila, not however before he had
already inspired some awe in his simple neighbors by the facility
with which he composed verses in his native tongue.

He began his studies in a private house while waiting for an
opportunity to enter the Ateneo, as the Jesuit school is called,
and while there he saw one of his tutors, Padre Burgos, haled to
an ignominious death on the garrote as a result of the affair of
1872. This made a deep impression on his childish mind and, in fact,
seems to have been one of the principal factors in molding his ideas
and shaping his career. That the effect upon him was lasting and that
his later judgment confirmed him in the belief that a great injustice
had been done, are shown by the fact that his second important work,
El Filibusterismo, written about 1891, and miscalled by himself a
"novel," for it is really a series of word-paintings constituting a
terrific arraignment of the whole regime, was dedicated to the three