To this the friars and the governing class of the Philippines were now contributing by providing the immediate sting that seems always to be needed when an old and deep-lying resentment is to be goaded into outward and physical activities. The friars and the governing class were palpable; their acts of oppression were daily before the people’s observation; but what they stood for as the emblems of a general condition was much more important than anything they did. Stories of men with causes just and righteous that had been ruined at the friars’ dictation in the farcical courts; stories of men and women persecuted as Mrs. Mercado had been persecuted; stories of men beaten to death, men strangled and men shot, men deported and women wronged, were brooded over in thousands of barrios. [18] They but completed the tale of three hundred years of government with the iron fist. CHAPTER II SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle, tractable disposition and a liking for books and study. He had been born at Calamba, June 19, 1861. In his earliest childhood he seemed undersized and undervitalized; but when he was six years old there came to his father’s house his uncle Manuel, a figure of health and a resolute practitioner of open-air sports, who took José in hand and with daily exercises and rigorous living built his body to normal strength and agility. Filipinos have a natural aptitude for athletics; he verified now the ancestral blood in his veins. He ran and jumped; he took long walks; he learned to fence, to ride, and to like the sun and the wind. By all accounts he must have been a singularly attractive child, even in a country where handsome children are common. His color was the fine tint of his people, a light, clean, even brown; his face a delicate oval, but the chin firm and rather long; the forehead nobly shaped, the nose almost classical, the lips full but nothing sensual. His eyes had a hardly discernible slant; when he was animated they flashed out of black depths a kind of black fire; but when he was quiescent they seemed gravely introspective. Long afterward his neighbors and relatives, trying to recall his boyhood, and perhaps overstraining memory, thought he seemed always much older than his years, a notion that may have arisen from his unusual habits. He liked to read or be read to; he liked at times to be alone; he liked to hear his elders argue; he liked to go to church to see the people there; and he liked to reason.