Free Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano

house of books, and they wanted to know how Don Miguel managed to keep them in such fine condition.
    â€œMy books breathe the air,” the sage explained. “I open them. I open them and ask them questions. Reading is asking questions.”
    Don Miguel asked questions of his books and he asked many more of the world.
    For the joy of asking questions, he traveled by horseback all over northern Argentina, step by step, hand’s breadth by hand’s breadth. That’s how he learned secrets that the map conceals, old ways of speaking and living, birdsongs that cities ignore, wild pharmacies that display their wares in the open fields.
    Not a few birds and plants were named by him.

September 26
W HAT W AS THE W ORLD L IKE W HEN I T W AS B EGINNING TO B E THE W ORLD?
    Florentino Ameghino was another inquisitive sage.
    A paleontologist from childhood, he was still a boy in 1865, more or less, when he assembled his first prehistoric giant in a town in the province of Buenos Aires. On a day like today he emerged from a deep cave weighed down by bones, then in the street he started sorting jaws, vertebrae, hipbones . . .
    â€œThis is a monster from the Mesozoic Era,” he explained to his neighbors. “Really ancient. You can’t imagine how ancient.”
    And behind his back Doña Valentina, the butcher, could not keep from laughing: “But sonny . . . They’re fox bones!”
    And they were.
    He was not discouraged.
    Throughout his life he gathered sixty thousand bones from nine thousand extinct animals, real or imaginary, and he wrote nineteen thousand pages that won him the gold medal and a diploma of honor at the Paris Exposition.

September 27
S OLEMN F UNERAL
    During the eleven presidencies of Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico lost half its territory and the president lost a leg.
    Half of Mexico was gobbled up by the neighbor to the north after a couple of battles and in return for fifteen million dollars. The leg, lost in combat, was buried on this day in 1842 in Santa Paula Cemetery with full military honors.
    The president, called Hero, Eagle, His Most Meritorious, Immortal Warrior, Founding Father, His Serene Highness, Napoleon of the West and the Mexican Caesar, lived in a mansion in Xalapa which looked a lot like the palace at Versailles.
    The president had all the furniture brought from Paris, even the decorations and knickknacks. In his bedroom he hung an enormous curved mirror, which vastly improved the looks of whomever contemplated his image in it. Every morning upon rising he stood before the magic mirror and it showed him a gentleman: tall, dapper—and honest.

September 28
R ECIPE FOR R EASSURING R EADERS
    Today is the international day devoted to the human right to information.
    Perhaps a good opportunity to recall that, a month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New York Times discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.
    On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it’s only “the Japanese continuing their propaganda . . . ”
    That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize.
    Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the New York Times , the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

September 29
A D ANGEROUS P RECEDENT
    In 1948 Seretse Khama, the black prince of Botswana, married Ruth Williams, who was English and white.
    No one was happy with the news. The British Crown, lord and master of much of black Africa, named a commission of inquiry to look into the matter. The wedding between two races sets a dangerous precedent, the Judicial Inquiry ruled. The commission’s report was suppressed, and the couple was ordered into exile.
    After his banishment, Khama came to