The Ateneo was not an easy school in which to gain distinction or to win favor; Rizal speedily achieved both. By the end of the first week he was going up in his class. In a month he had captured his first prize and seems to have looked upon it with rapture. At the end of the first quarter he had won another prize and the grade of “excellent.” He confesses that for the rest of that year he did not care to apply himself. He had taken on a boyish resentment to something a teacher had said, he explains. Possibly he was not yet inured to the prevailing method of driving instruction into the heads of the young with the aid of sarcasm and shouts. At the end of the year he says as if with a kind of sigh, “I had only second place in all my subjects.” He received the grade of “excellent” but no prizes, and the lack seems to have goaded him to remorse. It must have been efficacious, for when he returned to school he flung himself with something like passion into the race for these laurels, and it was said of him that no student there had ever equaled his performance. The fathers began to look with wondering pride upon this premier medal winner. For all that, he was a boy still and no mere Johnny Dighard; he had fights and he read novels and he even found time for social amenities, so called. At these latter he seems not to have won distinction, though the records are meager; but at least it may be said for him that he managed to fall in love. [39] One of the first works of fiction he read was Dumas’s “Count of Monte Christo” in Spanish. He says that it gave him “delight,” but it did more than that for him. The wrongs and sufferings of Edmond Dantes bore in upon him the misfortunes of his own people and sharply reminded him of his mother and the two terrible years she had spent in Santa Cruz jail. In Calamba and all about him festered a social system infinitely worse than any Dumas had imagined. About this time he began to lay out his days into a schedule of hours to which he aimed rigidly to adhere; so many hours for study, so many for reading; from four to five, exercise; five to six, something else. This was a plan he followed, or tried to follow, all the rest of his life, and accounts in part for that list of achievements that still staggers the investigators. It was strict economy of time and likewise an exercise in self-mastery, a virtue on which he set great store and in the practice of which few men outside of monastery walls have equaled him. He came to look upon his body as a kind of mechanism with which, as its master, he could do as he pleased; feed it, starve it, or run races with it. At the Ateneo he held it in subjection while he accumulated medals, fought when necessary, and composed treatises in chemistry, which, next to poetry and sculpture, had become his pleasure. CHAPTER III FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY