jackets, gold lace, sabres, and other accoutrements to match. Through my mother, I was to follow colonial vocations; through my father, the ideas and preoccupations of that revolutionary epoch were infiltrated into me; and obeying these contradictory impulses, I passed my leisure hours in beatific contemplation of my mud saints, duly painted, leaving them in turn quiet in their niches to give battle in front of the house between two armies which my neighbors and I had been preparing for perhaps a month before by a large hoarding of wax balls, in order to thin out the bedaubed files of shapeless puppet soldiers.
"I should not relate these trifles if they had not, later in life, taken colossal forms and prefigured one of those remembered events which even at this day make me palpitate with glory and vanity. . . . In regard to my sacerdotal vocation, I assisted when a boy of thirteen at a pious chapel in the house of the humpbacked Rodriguez, capable of holding twenty persons, and endowed with a sacristy, belfry, and other requisites, with candlesticks, thuribles, and musical bells made by Don Javier Jofre's negro, Rufino, and of which we made an enormous consumption in pealings and processions. The chapel was consecrated to our family patron, St. Domingo, I administering for two years the august dignity of Provincial of the order of Preachers, by acclamation of the chapter, and to the great edification of the devotees. The friars of the convent of St. Domingo came to hear me sing the mass in which I parodied my uncle, the curate, who sang very well, and I, being his acolyte, watched all the mechanism of the mass, not forgetting to mark the page in the missal in which were the gospel and epistle of the day, in order to reproduce them in perfection in my private mass.
"On Sunday afternoons, the Provincial transformed himself into the general-in-chief of an army of boys, and woe
