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282 influence of those sad impressions, to present myself in my country at some future day, and to say to Rosas and Benavides, and all my enemies (hangmen), 'You have had a mother; I come to honor the memory of mine; make a pause then in the brutalities of your policy; profane not an act of filial piety. Let me tell all men who this poor mother was that no longer exists;'—and as God lives, I would have fulfilled it as I have fulfilled so many other good vows, and as I will fulfill many others that I have made. Happily, I have her here at my side, and she instructs me in the events of other times unknown to me, forgotten by all. At seventy-six years of age my mother has crossed the Cordillera of the Andes to bid farewell to her son before descending to the tomb. This act alone may give an idea of the moral energy of her character. Each family is a poem, Lamartine has said, and mine is a sad, a luminous, and a useful one, like those distant paper lanterns of the hamlets, which serve to point the way to those who go astray in the fields.

"My mother preserves scarcely any traces of a severe and modest beauty, at this advanced age. Her lofty stature, her pronounced and bony form, her prominent cheekbones, the sign of decision and energy, are all the features of her exterior that deserve notice, unless it may be the prominent inequalities of her brow, so unusual in her sex. She knew how to read and write in her youth, but lost this facility from disuse in her old age. Her intellect has been little cultivated, and is destitute of all adornment, but so penetrating, that after listening to a class in grammar which I was instructing, while combing her fleeces of wool in the evening, she resolved all the difficulties which had puzzled her daughters, giving the definitions of nouns and verbs, tenses, and other accidents of speech, with rare sagacity and exactness. Apart from this, her soul, her