Little Jose did not know Spanish very well, so far as conversational usage was concerned, but his mother tried to impress on him the beauty of the Spanish poets and encouraged him in essays at rhyming which finally grew into quite respectable poetical compositions. One of these was a drama in Tagalog which so pleased a municipal captain of the neighboring village of Paete, who happened to hear it while on a visit to Kalamba, that the youthful author was paid two pesos for the production. This was as much money as a field laborer in those days would have earned in half a month; although the family did not need the coin, the incident impressed them with the desirability of cultivating the boy's talent. Jose was nine years old when he was sent to study in Binan. His master there, Justiniano Aquino Cruz, was of the old school and Rizal has left a record of some of his maxims, such as "Spare the rod and spoil the child," "The letter enters with blood," and other similar indications of his heroic treatment of the unfortunates under his care. However, if he was a strict disciplinarian, Master Justiniano was also a conscientious instructor, and the boy had been only a few months under his care when the pupil was told that he knew as much as his master, and had better go to Manila to school. Truthful Jose repeated this conversation without the modification which modesty might have suggested, and his father responded rather vigorously to the idea and it was intimated that in the father's childhood pupils were not accustomed to say that they knew as much as their teachers. However, Master Justiniano corroborated the child's statement, so that preparations for Jose's going to Manila began to be made. This was in the Christmas vacation of 1871. Binan had been a valuable experience for young Rizal. There he had met a host of relatives and from them heard much of the past of his father's family. His maternal grandfather's great house was there, now inhabited by his mother's half-brother, a most interesting personage. This uncle, Jose Alberto, had been educated in British India, spending eleven years in a Calcutta missionary school. This was the result of an acquaintance which his father had made with an English naval officer who visited the Philippines about 1820, the author of "An Englishman's Visit to the Philippines." Lorenzo Alberto, the grandfather, himself spoke English and had English associations. He had also liberal ideas and preferred the system under which the Philippines were represented in the Cortes and were treated not as a colony but as part of the homeland and its people were considered Spaniards.