I had nine sisters and a brother. Our father was a model parent. He gave us the education which was suitable in a family neither rich nor poor. He was thrifty. By careful saving, he was able to build a stone house. He also bought another house; and he put up a nipa cottage on our plot of irrigated ground. The cottage was shaded by bananas and trees.
At nightfall, my mother had us all say our prayers together. Then we would go to the azotea or to a window to enjoy the moonlight; and my nurse would tell us stories. Sometimes sad and sometimes gay, nurse’s stories were always oriental in their imagination. In these stories, dead people, gold, and plants on which diamonds grew were all mixed together.
When I was four years of age, my little sister Concha died, and for the first time I cried because of love and sorrow. Till then I had shed tears only for my own faults, which my loving, prudent mother well knew how to correct.
I learned to write in my own village. My father looked after my education. He paid an old man, who had been his schoolmate, to teach me the first steps in Latin. This teacher lived in our house till he died, five months later. He had been in almost perfect health and it was at the moment of death that he received extreme unction.
Mrs. Rizal-Mercado and her two daughters, Saturnina, the eldest, and Trinidad, then a baby
In June of 1868, I went to Manila with my father. That was just after the birth of Trinidad, the third sister younger than myself. We went in a casco which turned out to be a clumsy boat. I shall not try to tell how happy I was at each new stop on the banks of the Pasig. Beside this same river, a few years later, I was to be very sad. We went to Cainta, Taytay, and Antipolo, and then to Manila. In Santa Ana I visited my eldest sister, Saturnina, who at that time was a student in La Concordia College. Then I returned to my village and remained until 1870.
A dog and cayman combat modeled at Dapitan in 1894. The dog was Rizal’s own, and looked like one that had been his boyhood companion at Kalamba