and humiliating when inflicted for crimes. . . . When a pupil of the reading school, an elevated seat was constructed at the end of the hall, a sort of throne accessible by steps, and I was placed upon it with the name of 'FIRST CITIZEN.' Don Ignacio Rodriguez, who is still living, can tell if the seat was made for me. A youth named Domingo Moron succeeded me in that honorable place, and it afterwards fell into disuse. This circumstance and the consequent publicity acquired from that time, the praises of which I was always the object and the witness, must have contributed to give to my manners a character of fatuity of which I was not made aware until much later in life. From a child, I believed in my talents, as a rich man does in his money, or a soldier in his warlike deeds. Every one said so, and in nine years of school-life, there were not a dozen out of two thousand children who were before me in their capacity to learn, notwithstanding that at last I hated the school, as well as grammar, algebra, and arithmetic. My school morality also must have become slack by this eternal school-life, for I remember that I finally fell into disfavor with the master. . . .
"It is a deserved tribute to my mother to say that we were brought up in a holy horror of falsehood. I was always distinguished in school for exemplary veracity, and the masters rewarded it by proposing me as a model to others, praising me, and quoting me with encomiums, so that the purpose of being always truthful was deepened more and more in me; a purpose which has formed the foundation of my character, and to which all the acts of my life have testified.
"My school apprenticeship was concluded by one of those acts of injustice so frequent, from which I have guarded myself carefully whenever I have been in similar circumstances. Don Bernardino Rivadavia (then President),—
