ordinary quality, and four for a yard of anascote, the thread being thrown in. My mother wove twelve yards per week, which was the pattern for the dress of a friar, and received six dollars on Saturday, not without trespassing upon the night, to fill the quills with thread for the work of the following day. . . . The branches of industry carried on by my mother are so numerous and so various, that their enumeration would fatigue the memory with names which now signify nothing. . .
"My family has preserved the reputation of industrial omniscience until my day, and the habit of laboring with her hands is an integral part of my mother's existence. We heard her exclaim at Aconcagua, in 1842, 'This is the first time in my life that I have sat down with folded hands!' And at seventy-six years of her age, it has been necessary, in order to prevent her falling into a decline, to invent occupations adapted to her impaired vision, among which are delicate handiwork for ornaments of ladies' dresses, and other superfluities.
"When her home was finished, she married Don José Clemente Sarmiento, my father, a genteel young man of a family which had fallen into decay like her own, and brought to him as a dowry, the chain of privations and miseries in which she passed long years of her life. My father was a man endowed with a thousand good qualities, which balanced others that without being evil, looked in another direction. Like my mother, he had been educated in the rude labors of that epoch, a workman on the paternal farm of La Bebida, a mule-driver in the carrier-trains. He was beautiful in countenance, and with an irresistible passion for the pleasures of youth, deficient in that mechanical constancy which makes fortunes. Inspired by the new ideas which had come in with the Revolution, he had an unconquerable hatred for material labor, unintellectu-
