José Dias treated me with a mother’s affection and a servant’s attentiveness. The first thing that he arranged as soon as I was old enough to go out, was to dispense with the page boy; he became my page, and accompanied me in the street. He looked after my affairs at home, my books, my shoes, my cleanliness and my grammar. When I was eight, my plurals sometimes carried the wrong endings, and he would correct them, half seriously to give the requisite authority to the lesson, half laughing to ask pardon for correcting me. In this way he helped my primary teacher. Later, when Father Cabral taught me Latin, doctrine, and sacred history, he sat in on the lessons and made ecclesiastical comments. At the end, he would ask the priest: “Our young friend is making admirable progress, is he not?” He called me “a prodigy”; told my mother that he had known very intelligent boys in years gone by, but that I surpassed them all, not to mention the fact that, for my age, I already possessed a number of solid moral qualities. Even though I could hardly appreciate the value of these words of praise, I took pleasure in them; it was praise, after all.