rally.
One five-hundred-peso fee from a rich Englishman was devoted by Rizal
to lighting the town, and the community benefited in this way by his
charity in addition to the free treatment given its poor.
The little settlement at Talisay kept growing and those who lived
there were constantly improving it. When Father Obach, the Jesuit
priest, fell through the bamboo stairway in the principal house, Rizal
and his boys burned shells, made mortar, and soon built a fine stone
stairway. They also did another piece of masonry work in the shape of
a dam for storing water that was piped to the houses and poultry yard;
the overflow from the dam was made to fill a swimming tank.
The school, including the house servants, numbered about twenty and
was taught without books by Rizal, who conducted his recitations
from a hammock. Considerable importance was given to mathematics,
and in languages English was taught as well as Spanish, the entire
waking period being devoted to the language allotted for the day,
and whoever so far forgot as to utter a word in any other tongue was
punished by having to wear a rattan handcuff. The use and meaning of
this modern police device had to be explained to the boys, for Spain
still tied her prisoners with rope.
Nature study consisted in helping the Doctor gather specimens
of flowers, shells, insects and reptiles which were prepared and
shipped to German museums. Rizal was paid for these specimens by
scientific books and material. The director of the Royal Zooelogical
and Anthropological Museum in Dresden, Saxony, Doctor Karl von Heller,
was a great friend and admirer of Doctor Rizal. Doctor Heller's father
was tutor to the late King Alfonso XII and had many friends at the
Court of Spain. Evidently Doctor Heller and other of his European
friends did not consider Rizal a Spanish insurrectionary, but treated
him rather as a reformer seeking progress by peaceful means.
Doctor Rizal remunerated his pupils' work with gifts of clothing,
books and other useful remembrances. Sometimes the rewards were
cartidges, and those who had accumulated enough were permitted to
accompany him in his hunting expeditions. The dignity of labor was
practically inculcated by requiring everyone to make himself useful,
and this was really the first school of the type, combining the use
of English, nature study and industrial instruction.
On one occasion in the year 1894 some of his schoolboys secretly
went into the
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