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288 and rudely as he had been educated. I heard him say to the Presbyter Torres, speaking of me, 'O, no! my son shall never take a spade in his hand!' And the education he gave me showed that it was a fixed idea that had its birth in his profoundly mistaken views of life. In the bosom of poverty, he reared me an hidalgo, and my hands exercised no other forces than those required by my plays and pastimes. My father had one hand made useless by a callus he had acquired in labor.

"When the Revolution of Independence came, his excitable imagination made him waste, in services lent to his country, the small acquisitions he had made. After seeing in 1812 the miseries of Belgrano's army, he returned to San Juan, and undertook to make a collection for the Mother Country, as he was accustomed to call it, which proved quite abundant, and by the suggestion of jealous enemies was denounced to the Municipality as an act of spoliation. When the authorities inquired into the subject, they were so well satisfied, that he was charged with carrying his patriotic offering to the army in person, and this event gave him ever after the sobriquet of 'Mother Country', which, in his old age in Chili, was the origin of a calumny designed to injure his son. "In 1817, he accompanied San Martin to Chili as an officer of militia in the mechanical service of the army, and from the field of battle of Chacabuco, he was dispatched to San Juan to carry the plausible news of the triumph of the patriots. San Martin remembered him well in 1847, and was much pleased to learn that I was his son. "With these antecedents, my father passed his whole life in beginning speculations whose products were