was to measure out by the yard to those who came to buy them. But there must be books, I said, which treat specially of all things and teach them to children, and if one understands what he reads, he can learn them without the assistance of a master,—and I rushed to seek those books, and in that remote province, in that hour of taking my resolution, I found what I sought, such as I had conceived it, prepared by exiled patriots who wished well to America, and who had foreseen from London this necessity of South America to educate itself, and responding to my importunities had sent me the catechisms of Akermann which Don Tomas Rojo had introduced into San Juan. 'I have found it,' I could exclaim like Archimedes, for I had foreseen, sought and found those catechisms which later in the year 1829, I gave to Don Saturnino Laspiar for the education of his children.[1] There was ancient history, and that Persia, and that Egypt, those Pyramids, and that Nile, of which the clergyman Oro had told me. I studied the history of Greece by heart, and then that of Rome, feeling myself to be successively Leonidas and Brutus, Aristides, Camillus, Harmodius, and Epaminondas; and this while I was selling herbs and sugar, and making grimaces to those who came to draw me from my newly-discovered world where I wished to live. In the mornings after sweeping the shop, I read, and as a certain Senora passed by on her way from church, and her eyes always fell, day after day, month after month, upon that boy, immovable, insensible to every disturbance, his eyes fixed upon a book, one day, shaking her head, she said to her family, 'That lad cannot be good—if those books were good he would not read them so eagerly!'
"From that time I read every book that fell into my
- ↑ These were some young men whom the youthful Sarmiento taught to read, though much older than himself, and the sons of a wealthy man.
