oung and immature to conduct, was absorbed by larger
interests, and the young lad retained as an employe. As the years
passed the boy developed sufficient commercial ability to enable him
to retain his position and to extract from it enough to provide for
the needs of himself and his dependents. He married, late in life, a
woman whose family had fled from Cartagena with his own and settled in
Seville. She was but a babe in arms at the time of the exodus, and
many years his junior. A year after the marriage a child was born to
them, a son. The babe's birth was premature, following a fright which
the mother received when attacked by a beggar. But the child lived.
And, according to the honored family custom, which the father insisted
on observing as rigidly in Spain as it had been formerly in Cartagena,
this son, Jose Francisco Enrique de Rincon, was at birth consecrated
to the service of God in the Holy Catholic Church.

CHAPTER 3

If, as Thoreau said, "God is on the side of the most sensitive," then
He should have been very close to the timid, irresolute lad in
Seville, in whom the softer traits of character, so unexpectedly
developed in the adventurous founder of the Rincon family, now stood
forth so prominently. Somber, moody, and retiring; delicately
sensitive and shrinking; acutely honest, even to the point of
morbidity; deeply religious and passionately studious, with a
consuming zeal for knowledge, and an unsatisfied yearning for truth,
the little Jose early in life presented a strange medley of
characteristics, which bespoke a need of the utmost care and wisdom on
the part of those who should have the directing of his career. Forced
into the world before his time, and strongly marked by his mother's
fear; afflicted with precarious health, and subjected to long and
desperate illnesses in childhood, his little soul early took on a
gloom and asceticism wholly unnatural to youth. Fear was constantly
instilled into his acutely receptive mind by his solicitous, doting
parents; and his life was thereby stunted, warped, and starved. He was
reared under the constant reminder of the baleful effects of food, of
air, of conduct, of this and that invisible force inimical to health;
and terror and anxiety followed him like a ghost and turned about all
his boyish memories. Under these repressing influences his mind could
not but develop with a lack of stamina for self-support. Hesitancy and
vacillation became pronounce