Page:Civilization and barbarism (1868).djvu/359

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
EDUCATION.
315

streets of Roji, Desemparados, and Santa Barbara, and from there round to the Pueblo Rajo, and I alone, my teacher having abandoned me, that of the Cathedral Santa Lucia and Legua. That same year I went to San Luis to continue with the clergyman Oro the education which the revolution of 1824 had interrupted. A year later I was summoned by the government to be sent to the College of the Moral Sciences, and arrived at San Juan, after having once refused to go, at the moment when the lancers of Facundo Quiroga appeared from the dusty wood, fluttering their sinister banners through the streets. The next year I entered a commercial house as a timid apprentice,—I, who had been educated by the presbyter Oro, in solitude which so develops the imagination, dreaming of congresses, war, glory, liberty, in short, of the Republic. I was sad for many days, and, like Franklin, whom his parents destined for a soap-boiler, but who was destined to rob the heavens of their lightnings, and tyrants of their sceptres, I 'took an aversion to the road that leads to fortune.' In my musings, in hours of idleness, I returned to the fields of San Luis, where I wandered through the woods with my Latin grammar in my hand studying mascula sunt maribus, and interrupting the repetition by throwing stones at the birds. I missed that sonorous voice which had for two whole years sounded in my ears, placid, friendly, moving my heart-strings, calling out my sentiments, elevating my mind. The reminiscences of that oral shower which fell every day upon my soul, presented themselves like the pictures of a book whose significance we comprehend by the action of the figures. Peoples, history, geography, religion, morals, politics, all these were annotated as in an index, but I missed the book, which gave the details, and I was alone in the world in the midst of parcels of condiments and pieces of chintz, which I