Those that like to go over the first records of great men in search of phenomena foreshadowing something unusual in after-life will never be disappointed here. José mastered his alphabet when he was three years old, and before he was five could read in a Spanish version of the Vulgate from which his mother had taught him at her knee. [22] In other ways his debt to her was unusual; she turned his mind in his earliest years toward good literature, in which she had a discerning taste, being for her times and environment of rare learning and college bred in Manila. [23] With other accomplishments she knew and loved good poetry, could make it herself, and early taught José to make it. He grew up thus with the advantage of a bilingual background. About him the common speech was Tagalog; his mother made Spanish fairly familiar to his ear. Once she read to him a moral tale, “The Moth and the Candle,” translating as she went along, and emphasizing the lesson. The moth had been told by its mother to keep away from the flame, and now see what happened. A cocoanut-oil lamp was burning on the table as she read; winged insects were flying about and losing their lives in the blaze. José became much more interested in them than in the salutary warnings of his mother. He said afterward that he was not so much sorry for the insects that lost their lives as fascinated by their fate. The advice and warnings sounded feebly in my ears [he wrote]. What I thought of most was the death of the heedless moth. But in the depths of my heart I did not blame it. My mother’s care had not quite the result she intended. Years have passed since then. The child has become a man. He has crossed the most famous rivers of other countries. He has studied beside their broad streams. Steamships have carried him across seas and oceans. He has climbed mountains much higher than the Makiling of his native province, up to perpetual snow. He has received from experience bitter lessons, much more bitter than that sweet teaching which his mother gave him. Yet, in spite of all, the man still keeps the heart of a child. He still thinks that light is the most beautiful thing in creation, and that it is worth a man’s sacrificing his life for. [24]