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Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

by W. H. Hudson · English · Gutenberg #6093 · 548,835 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

Author: W. H. Hudson


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6093]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6093

Credits: Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO: A HISTORY OF MY EARLY LIFE ***




Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.



FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO

A HISTORY OF MY EARLY LIFE

BY W. H. HUDSON

Author of "Idle Days In Patagonia," "The Purple Land,"
"A Crystal Age," "Adventures Among Birds," Etc.





CONTENTS




CHAPTER I
EARLIEST MEMORIES

Preamble--The house where I was born--The singular ombu tree--A tree
without a name--The plain--The ghost of a murdered slave--Our
playmate, the old sheep-dog--A first riding-lesson--The cattle: an
evening scene--My mother--Captain Scott--The hermit and his awful
penance


CHAPTER II
MY NEW HOME

We quit our old home--A winter day journey--Aspect of the country--Our
new home--A prisoner in the barn--The plantation--A paradise of rats--
An evening scene--The people of the house--A beggar on horseback--Mr.
Trigg our schoolmaster--His double nature--Impersonates an old woman--
Reading Dickens--Mr. Trigg degenerates--Once more a homeless wanderer
on the great plain


CHAPTER III
DEATH OF AN OLD DOG

The old dog Caesar--His powerful personality--Last days and end--The
old dog's burial--The fact of death is brought home to me--A child's
mental anguish--My mother comforts me--Limitations of the child's
mind--Fear of death--Witnessing the slaughter of cattle--A man in the
moat--Margarita, the nursery-maid--Her beauty and lovableness--Her
death--I refuse to see her dead


CHAPTER IV
THE PLANTATION

Living with trees--Winter violets--The house is made habitable--Red
willow--Scizzor-tail and carrion-hawk--Lombardy poplars--Black acacia
--Other trees--The fosse or moat--Rats--A trial of strength with an
armadillo--Opossums living with a snake--Alfalfa field and
butterflies--Cane brake--Weeds and fennel--Peach trees in blossom--
Paroquets--Singing of a field finch--Concert-singing in birds--Old
John--Cow-birds' singing--Arrival of summer migrants


CHAPTER V
ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN

Appearance of a green level land--Cardoon and giant thistles--Villages
of the _vizcacha_, a large burrowing rodent--Groves and plantations
seen like islands on the wide level plains--Trees planted by the early
colonists--Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral
people--Houses as part of the landscape--Flesh diet of the gauchos--
Summer change in the aspect of the plain--The water-like mirage--The
giant thistle and a "thistle year"--Fear of fires--An incident at a
fire--The _pampero_, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles
--Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals--A great pampero
storm--Big hailstones--Damage caused by hail--Zango, an old horse,
killed--Zango and his master


CHAPTER VI
SOME BIRD ADVENTURES

Visit to a river on the pampas--A first long walk--Water-fowl--My
first sight of flamingoes--A great dove visitation--Strange tameness
of the birds--Vain attempts at putting salt on their tails--An ethical
question: When is a lie not a lie?--The _carancho_, a vulture-eagle--
Our pair of _caranchos_--Their nest in a peach tree--I am ambitious to
take their eggs--The birds' crimes--I am driven off by the birds--The
nest pulled down


CHAPTER VII
MY FIRST VISIT TO BUENOS AYRES

Happiest time--First visit to the capital--Old and New Buenos Ayres--
Vivid impressions--Solitary walk--How I learnt to go alone--Lost--The
house we stayed at and the sea-like river--Rough and narrow streets--
Rows of posts--Carts and noise--A great church festival--Young men in
black and scarlet--River scenes--Washerwomen and their language--Their
word-fights with young fashionables--Night watchmen--A young
gentleman's pastime--A fishing dog--A fine gentleman seen stoning
little birds--A glimpse of Don Eusebio, the Dictator's fool


CHAPTER VIII
THE TYRANT'S FALL AND WHAT FOLLOWED

The portraits in our drawing-room--The Dictator Rosas who was like an
Englishman--The strange face of his wife, Encarnacion--The traitor
Urquiza--The Minister of War, his peacocks and his son--Home again
from the city--The war deprives us of our playmate--Natalia, our
shepherd's wife--Her son, Medardo--The Alcalde, our grand old man--
Battle of Monte Caseros--The defeated army--Demands for fresh horses--
In peril--My father's shining defects--His pleasure in a thunderstorm
--A childlike trust in his fellow-men--Soldiers turn upon their
officer--A refugee given up and murdered--Our Alcalde again--On
cutting throats--Ferocity and cynicism--Native blood-lust and its
effects on a boy's mind--Feeling about Rosas--A bird poem or tale--
Vain search for lost poem and story of its authorship--The Dictator's
daughter--Time, the old god


CHAPTER IX
OUR NEIGHBOURS AT THE POPLARS

Homes on the great green plain--Making the acquaintance of our
neighbours--The attraction of birds--Los Alamos and the old lady of
the house--Her treatment of St. Anthony--The strange Barboza family--
The man of blood--Great fighters--Barboza as a singer--A great quarrel
but no fight--A cattle-marking--Dona Lucia del Ombu--A feast--Barboza
sings and is insulted by El Rengo--Refuses to fight--The two kinds of
fighters--A poor little angel on horseback--My feeling for Anjelita--
Boys unable to express sympathy--A quarrel with a friend--Enduring
image of a little girl


CHAPTER X
OUR NEAREST ENGLISH NEIGHBOUR

Casa Antigua, our nearest English neighbour's house--Old Lombardy
poplars--Cardoon thistle or wild artichoke--Mr. Royd, an English
sheep-farmer--Making sheep's-milk cheeses under difficulties--Mr.
Royd's native wife--The negro servants--The two daughters: a striking
contrast--The white blue-eyed child and her dusky playmate--A happy
family--Our visits to Casa Antigua--Gorgeous dinners--Estanislao and
his love of wild life--The Royds' return visit--A home-made carriage--
The gaucho's primitive conveyance--The happy home broken up


CHAPTER XI
A BREEDER OF PIEBALDS

La Tapera, a native estancia--Don Gregorio Gandara--His grotesque
appearance and strange laugh--Gandara's wife and her habits and pets--
My dislike of hairless dogs--Gandara's daughters--A pet ostrich--In
the peach orchard--Gandara's herds of piebald brood mares--His
masterful temper--His own saddle-horses--Creating a sensation at
gaucho gatherings--The younger daughter's lovers--Her marriage at our
house--The priest and the wedding breakfast--Demetria forsaken by her
husband


CHAPTER XII
THE HEAD OF A DECAYED HOUSE

The Estancia Canada Seca--Low lands and floods--Don Anastacio, a
gaucho exquisite--A greatly respected man--Poor relations--Don
Anastacio a pig-fancier--Narrow escape from a pig--Charm of the low
green lands--The flower called _macachina_--A sweet-tasting bulb
--Beauty of the green flower-sprinkled turf--A haunt of the golden
plover--The _bolas_--My plover-hunting experience--Rebuked by a
gaucho--A green spot, our playground in summer and lake in winter--The
venomous toad-like _Ceratophrys_--Vocal performance of the toad-like
creature--We make war on them--The great lake battle and its results


CHAPTER XIII
A PATRIARCH OF THE PAMPAS

The grand old man of the plains--Don Evaristo Penalva, the Patriarch--
My first sight of his estancia house--Don Evaristo described--A
husband of six wives--How he was esteemed and loved by every one--On
leaving home I lose sight of Don Evaristo--I meet him again after
seven years--His failing health--His old first wife and her daughter,
Cipriana--The tragedy of Cipriana--Don Evaristo dies and I lose sight
of the family


CHAPTER XIV
THE DOVECOTE

A favourite climbing tree--The desire to fly--Soaring birds-A
peregrine falcon--The dovecote and pigeon-pies--The falcon's
depredations--A splendid aerial feat--A secret enemy of the dovecote--
A short-eared owl in a loft--My father and birds--A strange flower--
The owls' nesting-place--Great owl visitations


CHAPTER XV
SERPENT AND CHILD

My pleasure in bird life--Mammals at our new home--Snakes and how
children are taught to regard them--A colony of snakes in the house--
Their hissing confabulations--Finding serpent sloughs--A serpent's
saviour--A brief history of our English neighbours, the Blakes


CHAPTER XVI
A SERPENT MYSTERY

A new feeling about snakes--Common snakes of the country--A barren
weedy patch--Discovery of a large black snake--Watching for its
reappearance--Seen going to its den--The desire to see it again--A
vain search--Watching a bat--The black serpent reappears at my feet--
Emotions and conjectures--Melanism--My baby sister and a strange
snake--The mystery solved


CHAPTER XVII
A BOY'S ANIMISM

The animistic faculty and its survival in us--A boy's animism and its
persistence--Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was--Serge
Aksakoff's history of his childhood--The child's delight in nature
purely physical--First intimations of animism in the child--How it
affected me--Feeling with regard to flowers--A flower and my mother
--History of a flower--Animism with regard to trees--Locust trees by
moonlight--Animism and nature-worship--Animistic emotion not uncommon
--Cowper and the Yardley oak--The religionist's fear of nature--
Pantheistic Christianity--Survival of nature-worship in England--
The feeling for nature--Wordsworth's pantheism and animistic emotion
in poetry


CHAPTER XVIII
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER

Mr. Trigg recalled--His successor--Father O'Keefe--His mild rule and
love of angling--My brother is assisted in his studies by the priest--
Happy fishing afternoons--The priest leaves us--How he had been
working out his own salvation--We run wild once more--My brother's
plan for a journal to be called _The Tin Box_--Our imperious editor's
exactions--My little brother revolts--_The Tin Box_ smashed up--The
loss it was to me


CHAPTER XIX
BROTHERS

Our third and last schoolmaster--His many accomplishments--His
weakness and final breakdown--My important brother--Four brothers,
unlike in everything except the voice--A strange meeting--Jack the
Killer, his life and character--A terrible fight--My brother seeks
instructions from Jack--The gaucho's way of fighting and Jack's
contrasted--Our sham fight with knives--A wound and the result--My
feeling about Jack and his eyes--Bird-lore--My two elder brothers'
practical joke


CHAPTER XX
BIRDING IN THE MARSHES

Visiting the marshes--Pajonales and juncales--Abundant bird life--A
coots' metropolis--Frightening the coots--Grebe and painted snipe
colonies--The haunt of the social marsh hawk--The beautiful jacana and
its eggs--The colony of marsh trupials--The bird's music--The aquatic
plant durasmillo--The trupial's nest and eggs--Recalling a beauty
that has vanished--Our games with gaucho boys--I am injured by a bad
boy--The shepherd's advice--Getting my revenge in a treacherous
manner--Was it right or wrong?--The game of hunting the ostrich


CHAPTER XXI
WILD-FOWLING ADVENTURES

My sporting brother and the armoury--I attend him on his shooting
expeditions--Adventure with golden plover--A morning after wild duck--
Our punishment--I learn to shoot--My first gun--My first wild duck--My
ducking tactics--My gun's infirmities--Duck-shooting with a
blunderbuss--Ammunition runs out--An adventure with rosy-bill duck--
Coarse gunpowder and home-made shot--The war danger comes our way--We
prepare to defend the house--The danger over and my brother leaves
home


CHAPTER XXII
BOYHOOD'S END

The book--The Saladero, or killing-grounds, and their smell--Walls
built of bullocks' skulls--A pestilential city--River water and Aljibe
water--Days of lassitude--Novel scenes--Home again--Typhus--My first
day out--Birthday reflections--What I asked of life--A boy's mind--A
brother's resolution--End of our thousand and one nights--A reading
spell--My boyhood ends in disaster


CHAPTER XXIII
A DARKENED LIFE

A severe illness--Case pronounced hopeless--How it affected me--
Religious doubts and a mind distressed--Lawless thoughts--Conversation
with an old gaucho about religion--George Combe and the desire for
immortality


CHAPTER XXIV
LOSS AND GAIN

The soul's loneliness--My mother and her death--A mother's love for
her son--Her character--Anecdotes--A mystery and a revelation--The
autumnal migration of birds--Moonlight vigils--My absent brother's
return--He introduces me to Darwin's works--A new philosophy of life--
Conclusion




CHAPTER I

EARLIEST MEMORIES

Preamble--The house where I was born--The singular Ombu tree--A tree
without a name--The plain--The ghost of a murdered slave--Our
playmate, the old sheep-dog--A first riding-lesson--The cattle: an
evening scene--My mother--Captain Scott--The hermit and his awful
penance.



It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to
writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some
incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in
_The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds,_
and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this
material would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book
as this. When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not
write a history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I
had already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I
really believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his
early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like
one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of
heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there,
some feature in the landscape--hill or wood or tower or spire--touched
and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in
obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call
up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence
or regular progression--nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or
patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide
shrouded mental landscape.

It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus
distinctly remembered and visualized are precisely those which were
most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory
while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed
how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's
life--at all events of some lives--in some rare state of the mind, it
is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever
blotted out.

It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I
had a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was
tempted--forced I may say--to write this account of my early years. I
will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a
psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in
anything else contained in the book.

I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one
November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the
bright colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an
east wind in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up
for six weeks with a very serious illness. Yet when it was over I
looked back on those six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so
little of physical pain. Never had I felt confinement less--I who
feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of
sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly
alive!

On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative
ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had
that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously
had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons,
when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some
flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and
so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely
emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was
different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the beginning,
it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire
wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible. Over it all my eyes
could range at will, choosing this or that point to dwell on, to
examine it in all its details; and, in the case of some person known
to me as a child, to follow his life till it ended or passed from
sight; then to return to the same point again to repeat the process
with other lives and resume my rambles in the old familiar haunts.

What a happiness it would be, I thought, in spite of discomfort and
pain and danger, if this vision would continue! It was not to be
expected; nevertheless it did not vanish, and on the second day I set
myself to try and save it from the oblivion which would presently
cover it again. Propped up with pillows I began with pencil and
writing-pad to put it down in some sort of order, and went on with it
at intervals during the whole six weeks of my confinement, and in this
way produced the first rough draft of the book.

And all this time I never ceased wondering at my own mental state; I
thought of it when, quickly tired, my trembling fingers dropped the
pencil; or when I woke from uneasy sleep to find the vision still
before me, inviting, insistently calling to me, to resume my childish
rambles and adventures of long ago in that strange world where I first
saw the light.

It was to me a marvellous experience; to be here, propped up with
pillows in a dimly-lighted room, the night-nurse idly dosing by the
fire; the sound of the everlasting wind in my ears, howling outside
and dashing the rain like hailstones against the window-panes; to be
awake to all this, feverish and ill and sore, conscious of my danger
too, and at the same time to be thousands of miles away, out in the
sun and wind, rejoicing in other sights and sounds, happy again with
that ancient long-lost and now recovered happiness!

During the three years that have passed since I had that strange
experience, I have from time to time, when in the mood, gone back to
the book and have had to cut it down a good deal and to reshape it, as
in the first draft it would have made too long and formless a history.

The house where I was born, on the South American pampas, was quaintly
named _Los Veinte-cinco Ombues,_ which means "The Twenty-five Ombu
Trees," there being just twenty-five of these indigenous trees--
gigantic in size, and standing wide apart in a row about 400 yards
long. The ombu is a very singular tree indeed, and being the only
representative of tree-vegetation, natural to the soil, on those great
level plains, and having also many curious superstitions connected
with it, it is a romance in itself. It belongs to the rare Phytolacca
family, and has an immense girth--forty or fifty feet in some cases;
at the same time the wood is so soft and spongy that it can be cut
into with a knife, and is utterly unfit for firewood, for when cut up
it refuses to dry, but simply rots away like a ripe water-melon. It
also grows slowly, and its leaves, which are large, glossy and deep
green, like laurel leaves, are poisonous; and because of its
uselessness it will probably become extinct, like the graceful pampas
grass in the same region. In this exceedingly practical age men
quickly lay the axe at the root of things which, in their view, only
cumber the ground; but before other trees had been planted the
antiquated and grand-looking ombu had its uses; it served as a
gigantic landmark to the traveller on the great monotonous plains, and
also afforded refreshing shade to man and horse in summer; while the
native doctor or herbalist would sometimes pluck a leaf for a patient
requiring a very violent remedy for his disorder. Our trees were about
a century old and very large, and, as they stood on an elevation, they
could be easily seen at a distance of ten miles. At noon in summer the
cattle and sheep, of which we had a large number, used to rest in
their shade; one large tree also afforded us children a splendid play-
house, and we used to carry up a number of planks to construct safe
bridges from branch to branch, and at noon, when our elders were
sleeping their siesta, we would have our arboreal games unmolested.

Besides the famous twenty-five, there was one other tree of a
different species, growing close to the house, and this was known all
over the neighbourhood as "The Tree," this proud name having been
bestowed on it because it was the only one of the kind known in that
part of the country; our native neighbours always affirmed that it was
the only one in the world. It was a fine large old tree, with a white
bark, long smooth white thorns, and dark-green undeciduous foliage.
Its blossoming time was in November--a month about as hot as an
English July--and it would then become covered with tassels of minute
wax-like flowers, pale straw-colour, and of a wonderful fragrance,
which the soft summer wind would carry for miles on its wings. And in
this way our neighbours would discover that the flowering season had
come to the tree they so much admired, and they would come to beg for
a branch to take home with them to perfume their lowly houses.

The pampas are, in most places, level as a billiard-table; just where
we lived, however, the country happened to be undulating, and our
house stood on the summit of one of the highest elevations. Before the
house stretched a great grassy plain, level to the horizon, while at
the back it sloped abruptly down to a broad, deep stream, which
emptied itself in the river Plata, about six miles to the east. This
stream, with its three ancient red willow-trees growing on the banks,
was a source of endless pleasure to us. Whenever we went down to play
on the banks, the fresh penetrating scent of the moist earth had a
strangely exhilarating effect, making us wild with joy. I am able now
to recall these sensations, and believe that the sense of smell, which
seems to diminish as we grow older, until it becomes something
scarcely worthy of being called a sense, is nearly as keen in little
children as in the inferior animals, and, when they live with nature,
contributes as much to their pleasure as sight or hearing. I have
often observed that small children, when brought on to low, moist
ground from a high level, give loose to a sudden spontaneous gladness,
running, shouting, and rolling over the grass just like dogs, and I
have no doubt that the fresh smell of the earth is the cause of their
joyous excitement.

Our house was a long low structure, built of brick, and, being very
old, naturally had the reputation of being haunted. A former
proprietor, half a century before I was born, once had among his
slaves a very handsome young negro, who, on account of his beauty and
amiability, was a special favourite with his mistress. Her preference
filled his poor silly brains with dreams and aspirations, and,
deceived by her gracious manner, he one day ventured to approach her
in the absence of his master and told her his feelings. She could not
forgive so terrible an insult to her pride, and when her husband
returned went to him, white with indignation, and told him how this
miserable slave had abused their kindness. The husband had an
implacable heart, and at his command the offender was suspended by the
wrists to a low, horizontal branch of "The Tree," and there, in sight
of his master and mistress, he was scourged to death by his fellow-
slaves. His battered body was then taken down and buried in a deep
hollow at some little distance from the last of the long row of ombu
trees. It was the ghost of this poor black, whose punishment had been
so much heavier than his offence deserved, that was supposed to haunt
the place. It was not, however, a conventional ghost, stalking about
in a white sheet; those who had seen it averred that it invariably
rose up from the spot where the body had been buried, like a pale,
luminous exhalation from the earth, and, assuming a human shape,
floated slowly towards the house, and roamed about the great trees,
or, seating itself on an old projecting root, would remain motionless
for hours in a dejected attitude. I never saw it.

Our constant companion and playmate in those days was a dog, whose
portrait has never faded from remembrance, for he was a dog with
features and a personality which impressed themselves deeply on the
mind. He came to us in a rather mysterious manner. One summer evening
the shepherd was galloping round the flock, and trying by means of
much shouting to induce the lazy sheep to move homewards. A strange-
looking lame dog suddenly appeared on the scene, as if it had dropped
from the clouds, and limping briskly after the astonished and
frightened sheep, drove them straight home and into the fold; and,
after thus earning his supper and showing what stuff was in him, he
established himself at the house, where he was well received. He was a
good-sized animal, with a very long body, a smooth black coat, tan
feet, muzzle, and "spectacles," and a face of extraordinary length,
which gave him a profoundly-wise baboon-like expression. One of his
hind legs had been broken or otherwise injured, so that he limped and
shuffled along in a peculiar lopsided fashion; he had no tail, and his
ears had been cropped close to his head: altogether he was like an old
soldier returned from the wars, where he had received many hard
knocks, besides having had sundry portions of his anatomy shot away.

No name to fit this singular canine visitor could be found, although
he responded readily enough to the word _Pechicho,_ which is used to
call any unnamed pup by, like pussy for a cat. So it came to pass that
this word _pechicho_--equivalent to "doggie" in English--stuck to him
for only name until the end of the chapter; and the end was that,
after spending some years with us, he mysteriously disappeared.

He very soon proved to us that he understood children as well as
sheep; at all events he would allow them to tease and pull him about
most unmercifully, and actually appeared to enjoy it. Our first
riding-lessons were taken on his back; but old Pechicho eventually
made one mistake, after which he was relieved from the labour of
carrying us. When I was about four years old, my two elder brothers,
in the character of riding-masters, set me on his back, and, in order
to test my capacity for sticking on under difficulties, they rushed
away, calling him. The old dog, infected with the pretended
excitement, bounded after them, and I was thrown and had my leg
broken, for, as the poet says--

     Children, they are very little,
     And their bones are very brittle.

Luckily their little brittle bones quickly solder, and it did not take
me long to recover from the effects of this mishap.

No doubt my canine steed was as much troubled as any one at the
accident. I seem to see the wise old fellow now, sitting in that
curious one-sided fashion he had acquired so as to rest his lame leg,
his mouth opened to a kind of immense smile, and his brown benevolent
eyes regarding us with just such an expression as one sees in a
faithful old negress nursing a flock of troublesome white children--so
proud and happy to be in charge of the little ones of a superior race!

All that I remember of my early life at this place comes between the
ages of three or four and five; a period which, to the eye of memory,
appears like a wide plain blurred over with a low-lying mist, with
here and there a group of trees, a house, a hill, or other large
object, standing out in the clear air with marvellous distinctness.
The picture that most often presents itself is of the cattle coming
home in the evening; the green quiet plain extending away from the
gate to the horizon; the western sky flushed with sunset hues, and the
herd of four or five hundred cattle trotting homewards with loud
lowings and bellowings, raising a great cloud of dust with their
hoofs, while behind gallop the herdsmen urging them on with wild
cries. Another picture is of my mother at the close of the day, when
we children, after our supper of bread and milk, join in a last grand
frolic on the green before the house. I see her sitting out of doors
watching our sport with a smile, her book lying in her lap, and the
last rays of the setting sun shining on her face.

When I think of her I remember with gratitude that our parents seldom
or never punished us, and never, unless we went too far in our
domestic dissensions or tricks, even chided us. This, I am convinced,
is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that
nature is wiser than they are, and to let their little ones follow, as
far as possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is they
have in place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen towards
her ducklings, when she has had frequent experience of their
incongruous ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good
for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she
can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into water. I
need not be told that the hen is after all only step-mother to her
ducklings, since I am contending that the civilized woman--the
artificial product of our self-imposed conditions--cannot have the
same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized woman really has to
hers. The comparison, therefore, holds good, the mother with us being
practically step-mother to children of another race; and if she is
sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their
seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to
a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which
many authors will have spoken to her in many books:

     But though they wrote it all by rote
     They did not write it right.

Of all the people outside of the domestic circle known to me in those
days, two individuals only are distinctly remembered. They were
certainly painted by memory in very strong unfading colours, so that
now they seem to stand like living men in a company of pale phantom
forms. This is probably due to the circumstance that they were
considerably more grotesque in appearance than the others, like old
Pechicho among our dogs--all now forgotten save him.

One was an Englishman named Captain Scott, who used to visit us
occasionally for a week's shooting or fishing, for he was a great
sportsman. We were all extremely fond of him, for he was one of those
simple men that love and sympathize with children; besides that, he
used to come to us from some distant wonderful place where sugar-plums
were made, and to our healthy appetites, unaccustomed to sweets of any
description, these things tasted like an angelic kind of food. He was
an immense man, with a great round face of a purplish-red colour, like
the sun setting in glory, and surrounded with a fringe of silvery-
white hair and whiskers, standing out like the petals round the disc
of a sunflower. It was always a great time when Captain Scott arrived,
and while he alighted from his horse we would surround him with loud
demonstrations of welcome, eager for the treasures which made his
pockets bulge out on all sides. When he went out gunning he always
remembered to shoot a hawk or some strangely-painted bird for us; it
was even better when he went fishing, for then he took us with him,
and while he stood motionless on the bank, rod in hand, looking, in
the light-blue suit he always wore, like a vast blue pillar crowned
with that broad red face, we romped on the sward, and revelled in the
dank fragrance of the earth and rushes.

I have not the faintest notion of who Captain Scott was, or of what he
was ever captain, or whether residence in a warm climate or hard
drinking had dyed his broad countenance with that deep magenta red,
nor of how and when he finished his earthly career; for when we moved
away the huge purple-faced strange-looking man dropped for ever out of
our lives; yet in my mind how beautiful his gigantic image looks! And
to this day I bless his memory for all the sweets he gave me, in a
land where sweets were scarce, and for his friendliness to me when I
was a very small boy.

The second well-remembered individual was also only an occasional
visitor at our house, and was known all over the surrounding country
as the Hermit, for his name was never discovered. He was perpetually
on the move, visiting in turn every house within a radius of forty or
fifty miles; and once about every seven or eight weeks he called on us
to receive a few articles of food--enough for the day's consumption.
Money he always refused with gestures of intense disgust, and he would
also decline cooked meat and broken bread. When hard biscuits were
given him, he would carefully examine them, and if one was found
chipped or cracked he would return it, pointing out the defect, and
ask for a sound one in return. He had a small, sun-parched face, and
silvery long hair; but his features were fine, his teeth white and
even, his eyes clear grey and keen as a falcon's. There was always a
set expression of deep mental anguish on his face, intensified with
perhaps a touch of insanity, which made it painful to look at him. As
he never accepted money or anything but food, he of course made his
own garments--and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to
see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a
bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head
and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is
remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite
a St. James's Park dandy compared with my hermit. He wore a pair of
gigantic shoes, about a foot broad at the toes, made out of thick cow-
hide with the hair on; and on his head was a tall rimless cow-hide hat
shaped like an inverted flower-pot. His bodily covering was, however,
the most extraordinary: the outer garment, if garment it can be
called, resembled a very large mattress in size and shape, with the
ticking made of innumerable pieces of raw hide sewn together. It was
about a foot in thickness and stuffed with sticks, stones, hard lumps
of clay, rams' horns, bleached bones, and other hard heavy objects; it
was fastened round him with straps of hide, and reached nearly to the
ground. The figure he made in this covering was most horribly uncouth
and grotesque, and his periodical visits used to throw us into a great
state of excitement. And as if this awful burden with which he had
saddled himself--enough to have crushed down any two ordinary men--was
not sufficient, he had weighted the heavy stick used to support his
steps with a great ball at the end, also with a large circular bell-
shaped object surrounding the middle. On arriving at the house, where
the dogs would become frantic with terror and rage at sight of him, he
would stand resting himself for eight or ten minutes; then in a
strange language, which might have been Hebrew or Sanscrit, for there
was no person learned enough in the country to understand it, he would
make a long speech or prayer in a clear ringing voice, intoning his
words in a monotonous sing-song. His speech done, he would beg, in
broken Spanish, for the usual charity; and, after receiving it, he
would commence another address, possibly invoking blessings of all
kinds on the donor, and lasting an unconscionable time. Then, bidding
a ceremonious farewell, he would take his departure.

From the sound of certain oft-recurring expressions in his recitations
we children called him "Con-stair Lo-vair"; perhaps some clever pundit
will be able to tell me what these words mean--the only fragment saved
of the hermit's mysterious language. It was commonly reported that he
had at one period of his life committed some terrible crime, and that,
pursued by the phantoms of remorse, he had fled to this distant
region, where he would never be met and denounced by any former
companion, and had adopted his singular mode of life by way of
penance. This was, of course, mere conjecture, for nothing could be
extracted from him. When closely questioned or otherwise interfered
with, then old Con-stair Lo-vair would show that his long cruel
penance had not yet banished the devil from his heart. A terrible
wrath would disfigure his countenance and kindle his eyes with
demoniac fire; and in sharp ringing tones, that wounded like strokes,
he would pour forth a torrent of words in his unknown language,
doubtless invoking every imaginable curse on his tormentor.

For upwards of twenty years after I as a small child made his
acquaintance he continued faithfully pursuing his dreary rounds,
exposed to cold and rain in winter and to the more trying heats of
summer; until at last he was discovered lying dead on the plain,
wasted by old age and famine to a mere skeleton, and even in death
still crushed down with that awful burden he had carried for so many
years. Thus, consistent to the end, and with his secret untold to any
sympathetic human soul, perished poor old Con-stair Lo-vair, the
strangest of all strange beings I have met with in my journey through
life.




CHAPTER II

MY NEW HOME

We quit our old home--A winter day journey--Aspect of the country--Our
new home--A prisoner in the barn--The plantation--A paradise of rats--
An evening scene--The people of the house--A beggar on horseback--Mr.
Trigg our schoolmaster--His double nature--Impersonates an old woman--
Reading Dickens--Mr. Trigg degenerates--Once more a homeless wanderer
on the great plain.



The incidents and impressions recorded in the preceding chapter
relate, as I have said, to the last year or two of my five years of
life in the place of my birth. Further back my memory refuses to take
me. Some wonderful persons go back to their second or even their first
year; I can't, and could only tell from hearsay what I was and did up
to the age of three. According to all accounts, the clouds of glory I
brought into the world--a habit of smiling at everything I looked at
and at every person that approached me--ceased to be visibly trailed
at about that age; I only remember myself as a common little boy--just
a little wild animal running about on its hind legs, amazingly
interested in the world in which it found itself.

Here, then, I begin, aged five, at an early hour on a bright, cold
morning in June--midwinter in that southern country of great plains or
pampas; impatiently waiting for the loading and harnessing to be
finished; then the being lifted to the top with the other little ones
--at that time we were five; finally, the grand moment when the start
was actually made with cries and much noise of stamping and snorting
of horses and rattling of chains. I remember a good deal of that long
journey, which began at sunrise and ended between the lights some time
after sunset; for it was my very first, and I was going out into the
unknown. I remember how, at the foot of the slope at the top of which
the old home stood, we plunged into the river, and there was more
noise and shouting and excitement until the straining animals brought
us safely out on the other side. Gazing back, the low roof of the
house was lost to view before long, but the trees--the row of twenty-
five giant ombu-trees which gave the place its name--were visible,
blue in the distance, until we were many miles on our way.

The undulating country had been left behind; before us and on both
sides the land, far as one could see, was absolutely flat, everywhere
green with the winter grass, but flowerless at that season, and with
the gleam of water, over the whole expanse. It had been a season of
great rains, and much of the flat country had been turned into shallow
lakes. That was all there was to see, except the herds of cattle and
horses and an occasional horseman galloping over the plain, and the
sight at long distances of a grove or small plantation of trees,
marking the site of an estancia, or sheep and cattle farm, these
groves appearing like islands on the sea-like flat country. At length
this monotonous landscape faded and vanished quite away, and the
lowing of cattle and tremulous bleating of sheep died out of hearing,
so that the last leagues were a blank to me, and I only came back to
my senses when it was dark and they lifted me down, so stiff with cold
and drowsy that I could hardly stand on my feet.

Next morning I found myself in a new and strange world. The house to
my childish eyes appeared of vast size: it consisted of a long range
of rooms on the ground, built of brick, with brick floors and roof
thatched with rushes. The rooms at one end, fronting the road, formed
a store, where the people of the surrounding country came to buy and
sell, and what they brought to sell was "the produce of the country"--
hides and wool and tallow in bladders, horsehair in sacks, and native
cheeses. In return they could purchase anything they wanted-knives,
spurs, rings for horse-gear, clothing, yerba mate and sugar; tobacco,
castor-oil, salt and pepper, and oil and vinegar, and such furniture
as they required--iron pots, spits for roasting, cane-chairs, and
coffins. A little distance from the house were the kitchen, bakery,
dairy, huge barns for storing the produce, and wood-piles big as
houses, the wood being nothing but stalks of the cardoon thistle or
wild artichoke, which burns like paper, so that immense quantities had
to be collected to supply fuel for a large establishment.

Two of the smallest of us were handed over to the care of a sharp
little native boy, aged about nine or ten years, who was told to take
us out of the way and keep us amused. The first place he took us to
was the great barn, the door of which stood open; it was nearly empty
just then, and was the biggest interior I had ever seen; how big it
really was I don't know, but it seemed to me about as big as Olympia
or the Agricultural Hall, or the Crystal Palace would be to any
ordinary little London boy. No sooner were we in this vast place than
we saw a strange and startling thing--a man, sitting or crouching on
the floor, his hands before him, the wrists tied together, his body
bound with thongs of raw hide to a big post which stood in the centre
of the floor and supported the beam of the loft above. He was a young
man, not more than twenty perhaps, with black hair and a smooth, pale,
sallow face. His eyes were cast down, and he paid no attention to us,
standing there staring at him, and he appeared to be suffering or ill.
After a few moments I shrank away to the door and asked our conductor
in a frightened whisper why he was tied up to a post there. Our native
boy seemed to be quite pleased at the effect on us, and answered
cheerfully that he was a murderer--he had committed a murder
somewhere, and had been caught last evening, but as it was too late to
take him to the lock-up at the village, which was a long distance
away, they had brought him here as the most convenient place, and tied
him in the barn to keep him safe. Later on they would come and take
him away.

Murder was a common word in those days, but I had not at that time
grasped its meaning; I had seen no murder done, nor any person killed
in a fight; I only knew that it must be something wicked and horrible.
Nevertheless, the shock I had received passed away in the course of
that first morning in a new world; but what I had seen in the barn was
not forgotten: the image of that young man tied to the post, his bent
head and downward gaze, and ghastly face shaded by lank black hair, is
as plain to me now as if I had seen him but yesterday.

A little back from the buildings were gardens and several acres of
plantation--both shade and fruit trees. Viewed from the outside, it
all looked like an immense poplar grove, on account of the double rows
of tall Lombardy poplar trees at the borders. The whole ground,
including the buildings, was surrounded by an immense ditch or moat.

Up till now I had lived without trees, with the exception of those
twenty-five I have spoken of, which formed a landmark for all the
country round; so that this great number--hundreds and thousands--of
trees was a marvel and delight. But the plantation and what it was to
me will form the subject of a chapter by itself. It was a paradise of
rats, as I very soon discovered. Our little native guide and
instructor was full of the subject, and promised to let us see the
rats with our own eyes as soon as the sun went down; that would finish
the day of strange sights with the strangest of all.

Accordingly, when the time came he led us to a spot beyond the barns
and wood-piles, where all the offal of slaughtered animals, bones, and
unconsumed meats from the kitchen, and rubbish from a wasteful,
disorderly establishment, were cast out each day. Here we all sat down
in a row on a log among the dead weeds on the border of the evil-
smelling place, and he told us to be very still and speak no word;
for, said he, unless we move or make a sound the rats will not heed
us; they will regard us as so many wooden images. And so it proved,
for very soon after the sun had gone down we began to see rats
stealing out of the woodpile and from the dead weeds on every side,
all converging to that one spot where a generous table was spread for
them and for the brown carrion hawks that came by day. Big, old, grey
rats with long, scaly tails, others smaller, and smaller still, the
least of all being little bigger than mice, until the whole place
swarmed with them, all busily hunting for food, feeding, squealing,
fighting, and biting. I had not known that the whole world contained
so many rats as I now saw congregated before me.

Suddenly our guide jumped up and loudly clapped his hands, which
produced a curious effect--a short, sharp little shriek of terror from
the busy multitude, followed by absolute stillness, every rat frozen
to stone, which lasted for a second or two; then a swift scuttling
away in all directions, vanishing with a rustling sound through the
dead grass and wood.

It had been a fine spectacle, and we enjoyed it amazingly; it raised
_Mus decumanus_ to a beast of immense importance in my mind. Soon he
became even more important in an unpleasant way when it was discovered
that rats were abundant indoors as well as out. The various noises
they made at night were terrifying; they would run over our beds and
sometimes we would wake up to find that one had got in between the
sheets and was trying frantically to get out. Then we would yell, and
half the house would be roused and imagine some dreadful thing. But
when they found out the cause, they would only laugh at and rebuke us
for being such poor little cowards.

But what an astonishing place was this to which we had come! The great
house and many buildings and the people in it, the foss, the trees
that enchanted me, the dirt and disorder, vile rats and fleas and
pests of all sorts! The place had been for some years in the hands of
a Spanish or native family--indolent, careless, happy-go-lucky people.
The husband and wife were never in harmony or agreement about anything
for five minutes together, and by and by he would go away to the
capital "on business," which would keep him from home for weeks, and
even months, at a stretch. And she, with three light-headed, grown-up
daughters, would be left to run the establishment with half-a-dozen
hired men and women to assist her. I remember her well, as she stayed
on a few days in order to hand over the place to us--an excessively
fat, inactive woman, who sat most of the day in an easy-chair,
surrounded by her pets--lap-dogs, Amazon parrots, and several
shrieking parakeets.

Before many days she left, with all her noisy crowd of dogs and birds
and daughters, and of the events of the succeeding days and weeks
nothing remains in memory except one exceedingly vivid impression--my
first sight of a beggar on horseback. It was by no means an uncommon
sight in those days when, as the gauchos were accustomed to say, a man
without a horse was a man without legs; but it was new to me when one
morning I saw a tall man on a tall horse ride up to our gate,
accompanied by a boy of nine or ten on a pony. I was struck with the
man's singular appearance, sitting upright and stiff in his saddle,
staring straight before him. He had long grey hair and beard, and wore
a tall straw hat shaped like an inverted flower-pot, with a narrow
brim--a form of hat which had lately gone out of fashion among the
natives but was still used by a few. Over his clothes he wore a red
cloak or poncho, and heavy iron spurs on his feet, which were cased in
the _botas de potro_, or long stockings made of a colt's untanned
hide.

Arrived at the gate he shouted _Ave Maria purissima_ in a loud voice,
then proceeded to give an account of himself, informing us that he was
a blind man and obliged to subsist on the charity of his neighbours.
They in their turn, he said, in providing him with all he required
were only doing good to themselves, seeing that those who showed the
greatest compassion towards their afflicted fellow-creatures were
regarded with special favour by the Powers above.

After delivering himself of all this and much more as if preaching a
sermon, he was assisted from his horse and led by the hand to the
front door, after which the boy drew back and folding his arms across
his breast stared haughtily at us children and the others who had
congregated at the spot. Evidently he was proud of his position as
page or squire or groom of the important person in the tall straw hat,
red cloak, and iron spurs, who galloped about the land collecting
tribute from the people and talking loftily about the Powers above.

Asked what he required at our hands the beggar replied that he wanted
yerba mate, sugar, bread, and some hard biscuits, also cut tobacco and
paper for cigarettes and some leaf tobacco for cigars. When all these
things had been given him, he was asked (not ironically) if there was
anything else we could supply him with, and he replied, Yes, he was
still in want of rice, flour, and farina, an onion or two, a head or
two of garlic, also salt, pepper, and pimento, or red pepper. And when
he had received all these comestibles and felt them safely packed in
his saddle-bags, he returned thanks, bade good-bye in the most
dignified manner, and was led back by the haughty little boy to his
tall horse.

 We had been settled some months in our new home, and I was just about
half way through my sixth year, when one morning at breakfast we
children were informed to our utter dismay that we could no longer be
permitted to run absolutely wild; that a schoolmaster had been engaged
who would live in the house and would have us in the schoolroom during
the morning and part of the afternoon.

Our hearts were heavy in us that day, while we waited apprehensively
for the appearance of the man who would exercise such a tremendous
power over us and would stand between us and our parents, especially
our mother, who had ever been our shield and refuge from all pains and
troubles. Up till now they had acted on the principle that children
were best left to themselves, that the more liberty they had the
better it was for them. Now it almost looked as if they were turning
against us; but we knew that it could not be so--we knew that every
slightest pain or grief that touched us was felt more keenly by our
mother than by ourselves, and we were compelled to believe her when
she told us that she, too, lamented the restraint that would be put
upon us, but knew that it would be for our ultimate good.

And on that very afternoon the feared man arrived, Mr. Trigg by name,
an Englishman, a short, stoutish, almost fat little man, with grey
hair, clean-shaved sunburnt face, a crooked nose which had been broken
or was born so, clever mobile mouth, and blue-grey eyes with a
humorous twinkle in them and crow's-feet at the corners. Only to us
youngsters, as we soon discovered, that humorous face and the
twinkling eyes were capable of a terrible sternness. He was loved, I
think, by adults generally, and regarded with feelings of an opposite
nature by children. For he was a schoolmaster who hated and despised
teaching as much as children in the wild hated to be taught. He
followed teaching because all work was excessively irksome to him, yet
he had to do something for a living, and this was the easiest thing he
could find to do. How such a man ever came to be so far from home in a
half-civilized country was a mystery, but there he was, a bachelor and
homeless man after twenty or thirty years on the pampas, with little
or no money in his pocket, and no belongings except his horse--he
never owned more than one at a time--and its cumbrous native saddle,
and the saddle-bags in which he kept his wardrobe and whatever he
possessed besides. He didn't own a box. On his horse, with his saddle-
bags behind him, he would journey about the land, visiting all the
English, Scotch, and Irish settlers, who were mostly sheep-farmers,
but religiously avoiding the houses of the natives. With the natives
he could not affiliate, and not properly knowing and incapable of
understanding them he regarded them with secret dislike and suspicion.
And by and by he would find a house where there were children old
enough to be taught their letters, and Mr. Trigg would be hired by the
month, like a shepherd or cowherd, to teach them, living with the
family. He would go on very well for a time, his failings being
condoned for the sake of the little ones; but by and by there would be
a falling-out, and Mr. Trigg would saddle his horse, buckle on the
saddle-bags, and ride forth over the wide plain in quest of a new
home. With us he made an unusually long stay; he liked good living and
comforts generally, and at the same time he was interested in the
things of the mind, which had no place in the lives of the British
settlers of that period; and now he found himself in a very
comfortable house, where there were books to read and people to
converse with who were not quite like the rude sheep- and cattle-
farmers he had been accustomed to live with. He was on his best
behaviour, and no doubt strove hard and not unsuccessfully to get the
better of his weaknesses. He was looked on as a great acquisition, and
made much of; in the school-room he was a tyrant, and having been
forbidden to punish us by striking, he restrained himself when to
thrash us would have been an immense relief to him. But pinching was
not striking, and he would pinch our ears until they almost bled. It
was a poor punishment and gave him little satisfaction, but it had to
serve. Out of school his temper would change as by magic. He was then
the life of the house, a delightful talker with an inexhaustible fund
of good stories, a good reader, mimic, and actor as well.

One afternoon we had a call from a quaint old Scotch dame, in a queer
dress, sunbonnet, and spectacles, who introduced herself as the wife
of Sandy Maclachlan, a sheep-farmer who lived about twenty-five miles
away. It wasn't right, she said, that such near neighbours should not
know one another, so she had ridden those few leagues to find out what
we were like. Established at the tea-table, she poured out a torrent
of talk in broadest Scotch, in her high-pitched cracked old-woman's
voice, and gave us an intimate domestic history of all the British
residents of the district. It was all about what delightful people
they were, and how even their little weaknesses--their love of the
bottle, their meannesses, their greed and low cunning--only served to
make them more charming. Never was there such a funny old dame or one
more given to gossip and scandal-mongering! Then she took herself off,
and presently we children, still under her spell, stole out to watch
her departure from the gate. But she was not there--she had vanished
unaccountably; and by and by what was our astonishment and disgust to
hear that the old Scotch body was none other than our own Mr. Trigg!
That our needle-sharp eyes, concentrated for an hour on her face, had
failed to detect the master who was so painfully familiar to us seemed
like a miracle.

Mr. Trigg confessed that play-acting was one of the things he had done
before quitting his country; but it was only one of a dozen or twenty
vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them
again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed
months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his
ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world. As a
reader he certainly was great, and every evening, when the evenings
were long, he would give a two hours' reading to the household.
Dickens was then the most popular writer in the world, and he usually
read Dickens, to the delight of his listeners. Here he could display
his histrionic qualities to the full. He impersonated every character
in the book, endowing him with voice, gestures, manner, and expression
that fitted him perfectly. It was more like a play than a reading.

"What should we do without Mr. Trigg?" our elders were accustomed to
say; but we little ones, remembering that it would not be the
beneficent countenance of Mr. Pickwick that would look on us in the
schoolroom on the following morning, only wished that Mr. Trigg was
far, far away.

Perhaps they made too much of him: at all events he fell into the
habit of going away every Saturday morning and not returning until the
following Monday. His week-end visit was always to some English or
Scotch neighbour, a sheep-farmer, ten or fifteen or twenty miles
distant, where the bottle or demi-john of white Brazilian rum was
always on the table. It was the British exile's only substitute for
his dear lost whisky in that far country. At home there was only tea
and coffee to drink. From these outings he would return on Monday
morning, quite sober and almost too dignified in manner, but with
inflamed eyes and (in the schoolroom) the temper of a devil. On one of
these occasions, something--our stupidity perhaps, or an exceptionally
bad headache--tried him beyond endurance, and taking down his
_revenque_, or native horse-whip made of raw hide, from the wall,
he began laying about him with such extraordinary fury that the room
was quickly in an uproar. Then all at once my mother appeared on the
scene, and the tempest was stilled, though the master, with the whip
in his uplifted hand, still stood, glaring with rage at us. She stood
silent a moment or two, her face very white, then spoke: "Children,
you may go and play now. School is over;" then, lest the full purport
of her words should not be understood, she added, "Your schoolmaster
is going to leave us."

It was an unspeakable relief, a joyful moment; yet on that very day,
and on the next before he rode away, I, even I who had been unjustly
and cruelly struck with a horsewhip, felt my little heart heavy in me
when I saw the change in his face--the dark, still, brooding look, and
knew that the thought of his fall and the loss of his home was
exceedingly bitter to him. Doubtless my mother noticed it, too, and
shed a few compassionate tears for the poor man, once more homeless on
the great plain. But he could not be kept after that insane outbreak.
To strike their children was to my parents a crime; it changed their
nature and degraded them, and Mr. Trigg could not be forgiven.

Mr. Trigg, as I have said before, was a long time with us, and the
happy deliverance I have related did not occur until I was near the
end of my eighth year. At the present stage of my story I am not yet
six, and the incident related in the following chapter, in which Mr.
Trigg figures, occurred when I was within a couple of months of
completing my sixth year.




CHAPTER III

DEATH OF AN OLD DOG

The old dog Caesar--His powerful personality--Last days and end--The
old dog's burial--The fact of death is brought home to me--A child's
mental anguish--My mother comforts me--Limitations of the child's
mind--Fear of death--Witnessing the slaughter of cattle--A man in the
moat--Margarita, the nursery maid--Her beauty and lovableness--Her
death--I refuse to see her dead.



When recalling the impressions and experiences of that most eventful
sixth year, the one incident which looks biggest in memory, at all
events in the last half of that year, is the death of Caesar. There is
nothing in the past I can remember so well: it was indeed the most
important event of my childhood--the first thing in a young life which
brought the eternal note of sadness in.

It was in the early spring, about the middle of August, and I can even
remember that it was windy weather and bitterly cold for the time of
year, when the old dog was approaching his end.

Caesar was an old valued dog, although of no superior breed: he was
just an ordinary dog of the country, short-haired, with long legs and
a blunt muzzle. The ordinary dog or native cur was about the size of a
Scotch collie; Caesar was quite a third larger, and it was said of him
that he was as much above all other dogs of the house, numbering about
twelve or fourteen, in intelligence and courage as in size. Naturally,
he was the leader and master of the whole pack, and when he got up
with an awful growl, baring his big teeth, and hurled himself on the
others to chastise them for quarrelling or any other infringement of
dog law, they took it lying down. He was a black dog, now in his old
age sprinkled with white hairs all over his body, the face and legs
having gone quite grey. Caesar in a rage, or on guard at night, or
when driving cattle in from the plains, was a terrible being; with us
children he was mild-tempered and patient, allowing us to ride on his
back, just like old Pechicho the sheep-dog, described in the first
chapter. Now, in his decline, he grew irritable and surly, and ceased
to be our playmate. The last two or three months of his life were very
sad, and when it troubled us to see him so gaunt, with his big ribs
protruding from his sides, to watch his twitchings when he dozed,
groaning and wheezing the while, and marked, too, how painfully he
struggled to get up on his feet, we wanted to know why it was so--why
we could not give him something to make him well? For answer they
would open his great mouth to show us his teeth--the big blunt canines
and old molars worn down to stumps. Old age was what ailed him--he was
thirteen years old, and that did verily seem to me a great age, for I
was not half that, yet it seemed to me that I had been a very, very
long time in the world.

No one dreamed of such a thing as putting an end to him--no hint of
such a thing was ever spoken. It was not the custom in that country to
shoot an old dog because he was past work. I remember his last day,
and how often we came to look at him and tried to comfort him with
warm rugs and the offer of food and drink where he was lying in a
sheltered place, no longer able to stand up. And that night he died:
we knew it as soon as we were up in the morning. Then, after
breakfast, during which we had been very solemn and quiet, our
schoolmaster said: "We must bury him today--at twelve o'clock, when I
am free, will be the best time; the boys can come with me, and old
John can bring his spade." This announcement greatly excited us, for
we had never seen a dog buried, and had never even heard of such a
thing having ever been done.

About noon that day old Caesar, dead and stiff, was taken by one of
the workmen to a green open spot among the old peach trees, where his
grave had already been dug. We followed our schoolmaster and watched
while the body was lowered and the red earth shovelled in. The grave
was deep, and Mr. Trigg assisted in filling it, puffing very much over
the task and stopping at intervals to mop his face with his coloured
cotton handkerchief.

Then, when all was done, while we were still standing silently around,
it came into Mr. Trigg's mind to improve the occasion. Assuming his
schoolroom expression he looked round at us and said solemnly: "That's
the end. Every dog has his day and so has every man; and the end is
the same for both. We die like old Caesar, and are put into the ground
and have the earth shovelled over us."

Now these simple, common words affected me more than any other words I
have heard in my life. They pierced me to the heart. I had heard
something terrible--too terrible to think of, incredible--and yet--and
yet if it was not so, why had he said it? Was it because he hated us,
just because we were children and he had to teach us our lessons, and
wanted to torture us? Alas! no, I could not believe that! Was this,
then, the horrible fate that awaited us all? I had heard of death--I
knew there was such a thing; I knew that all animals had to die, also
that some men died. For how could any one, even a child in its sixth
year, overlook such a fact, especially in the country of my birth--a
land of battle, murder, and sudden death? I had not forgotten the
young man tied to the post in the barn who had killed some one, and
would perhaps, I had been told, be killed himself as a punishment. I
knew, in fact, that there was good and evil in the world, good and bad
men, and the bad men--murderers, thieves, and liars--would all have to
die, just like animals; but that there was any life after death I did
not know. All the others, myself and my own people included, were good
and would never taste death. How it came about that I had got no
further in my system or philosophy of life I cannot say; I can only
suppose that my mother had not yet begun to give me instruction in
such matters on account of my tender years, or else that she had done
so and that I had understood it in my own way. Yet, as I discovered
later, she was a religious woman, and from infancy I had been taught
to kneel and say a little prayer each evening: "Now I lay me down to
sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep"; but who the Lord was or what
my soul was I had no idea. It was just a pretty little way of saying
in rhyme that I was going to bed. My world was a purely material one,
and a most wonderful world it was, but how I came to be in it I didn't
know; I only knew (or imagined) that I would be in it always, seeing
new and strange things every day, and never, never get tired of it. In
literature it is only in Vaughan, Traherne, and other mystics, that I
find any adequate expression of that perpetual rapturous delight in
nature and my own existence which I experienced at that period.

And now these never-to-be-forgotten words spoken over the grave of our
old dog had come to awaken me from that beautiful dream of perpetual
joy!

When I recall this event I am less astonished at my ignorance than at
the intensity of the feeling I experienced, the terrible darkness it
brought on so young a mind. The child's mind we think, and in fact
know, is like that of the lower animals; or if higher than the animal
mind, it is not so high as that of the simplest savage. He cannot
concentrate his thought--he cannot think at all; his consciousness is
in its dawn; he revels in colours, in odours, is thrilled by touch and
taste and sound, and is like a well-nourished pup or kitten at play on
a green turf in the sunshine. This being so, one would have thought
that the pain of the revelation I had received would have quickly
vanished--that the vivid impressions of external things would have
blotted it out and restored the harmony. But it was not so; the pain
continued and increased until it was no longer to be borne; then I
sought my mother, first watching until she was alone in her room. Yet
when with her I feared to speak lest with a word she should confirm
the dreadful tidings. Looking down, she all at once became alarmed at
the sight of my face, and began to question me. Then, struggling
against my tears, I told her of the words which had been spoken at the
old dog's burial, and asked her if it was true, if I--if she--if all
of us had to die and be buried in the ground? She replied that it was
not wholly true; it was only true in a way, since our bodies had to
die and be buried in the earth, but we had an immortal part which
could not die. It was true that old Caesar had been a good, faithful
dog, and felt and understood things almost like a human being, and
most persons believed that when a dog died he died wholly and had no
after-life. We could not know that; some very great, good men had
thought differently; they believed that the animals, like us, would
live again. That was also her belief--her strong hope; but we could
not know for certain, because it had been hidden from us. For
ourselves, we knew that we could not really die, because God Himself,
who made us and all things, had told us so, and His promise of eternal
life had been handed down to us in His Book--in the Bible.

To all this and much more I listened trembling, with a fearful
interest, and when I had once grasped the idea that death when it came
to me, as it must, would leave me alive after all--that, as she
explained, the part of me that really mattered, the myself, the I am
I, which knew and considered things, would never perish, I experienced
a sudden immense relief. When I went out from her side again I wanted
to run and jump for joy and cleave the air like a bird. For I had been
in prison and had suffered torture, and was now free again--death
would not destroy me!

There was another result of my having unburdened my heart to my
mother. She had been startled at the poignancy of the feeling I had
displayed, and, greatly blaming herself for having left me too long in
that ignorant state, began to give me religious instruction. It was
too early, since at that age it was not possible for me to rise to the
conception of an immaterial world. That power, I imagine, comes later
to the normal child at the age of ten or twelve. To tell him when he
is five or six or seven that God is in all places at once and sees all
things, only produces the idea of a wonderfully active and quick-
sighted person, with eyes like a bird's, able to see what is going on
all round. A short time ago I read an anecdote of a little girl who,
on being put to bed by her mother, was told not to be afraid in the
dark, since God would be there to watch and guard her while she slept.
Then, taking the candle, the mother went downstairs; but presently her
little girl came down too, in her nightdress, and, when questioned,
replied, "I'm going to stay down here in the light, mummy, and you can
go up to my room and sit with God." My own idea of God at that time
was no higher. I would lie awake thinking of him there in the room,
puzzling over the question as to how he could attend to all his
numerous affairs and spend so much time looking after me. Lying with
my eyes open, I could see nothing in the dark; still, I knew he was
there, because I had been told so, and this troubled me. But no sooner
would I close my eyes than his image would appear standing at a
distance of three or four feet from the head of the bed, in the form
of a column five feet high or so and about four feet in circumference.
The colour was blue, but varied in depth and intensity; on some nights
it was sky-blue, but usually of a deeper shade, a pure, soft,
beautiful blue like that of the morning-glory or wild geranium.

It would not surprise me to find that many persons have some such
material image or presentment of the spiritual entities they are
taught to believe in at too tender an age. Recently, in comparing
childish memories with a friend, he told me that he too always saw God
as a blue object, but of no definite shape.

That blue column haunted me at night for many months; I don't think it
quite vanished, ceasing to be anything but a memory, until I was
seven--a date far ahead of where we are now.

To return to that second blissful revelation which came to me from my
mother. Happy as it made me to know that death would not put an end to
my existence, my state after the first joyful relief was not one of
perfect happiness. All she said to comfort and make me brave had
produced its effect--I knew now that death was but a change to an even
greater bliss than I could have in this life. How could I, not yet
six, think otherwise than as she had told me to think, or have a
doubt? A mother is more to her child than any other being, human or
divine, can ever be to him in his subsequent life. He is as dependent
on her as any fledgling in the nest on its parent--even more, since
she warms his callow mind or soul as well as body.

Notwithstanding all this, the fear of death came back to me in a
little while, and for a long time disquieted me, especially when the
fact of death was brought sharply before me. These reminders were only
too frequent; there was seldom a day on which I did not see something
killed. When the killing was instantaneous, as when a bird was shot
and dropped dead like a stone, I was not disturbed; it was nothing but
a strange, exciting spectacle, but failed to bring the fact of death
home to me. It was chiefly when cattle were slaughtered that the
terror returned in its full force. And no wonder! The native manner of
killing a cow or bullock at that time was peculiarly painful.
Occasionally it would be slaughtered out of sight on the plain, and
the hide and flesh brought in by the men, but, as a rule, the beast
would be driven up close to the house to save trouble. One of the two
or three mounted men engaged in the operation would throw his lasso
over the horns, and, galloping off, pull the rope taut; a second man
would then drop from his horse, and running up to the animal behind,
pluck out his big knife and with two lightning-quick blows sever the
tendons of both hind legs. Instantly the beast would go down on his
haunches, and the same man, knife in hand, would flit round to its
front or side, and, watching his opportunity, presently thrust the
long blade into its throat just above the chest, driving it in to the
hilt and working it round; then when it was withdrawn a great torrent
of blood would pour out from the tortured beast, still standing on his
fore-legs, bellowing all the time with agony. At this point the
slaughterer would often leap lightly on to its back, stick his spurs
in its sides, and, using the flat of his long knife as a whip, pretend
to be riding a race, yelling with fiendish glee. The bellowing would
subside into deep, awful, sob-like sounds and chokings; then the
rider, seeing the animal about to collapse, would fling himself nimbly
off. The beast down, they would all run to it, and throwing themselves
on its quivering side as on a couch, begin making and lighting their
cigarettes.

Slaughtering a cow was grand sport for them, and the more active and
dangerous the animal, the more prolonged the fight, the better they
liked it; they were as joyfully excited as at a fight with knives or
an ostrich hunt. To me it was an awful object-lesson, and held me
fascinated with horror. For this was death! The crimson torrents of
blood, the deep, human-like cries, made the beast appear like some
huge, powerful man caught in a snare by small, weak, but cunning
adversaries, who tortured him for their delight and mocked him in his
agony.

There were other occurrences about that time to keep the thoughts and
fear of death alive. One day a traveller came to the gate, and, after
unsaddling his horse, went about sixty or seventy yards away to a
shady spot, where he sat down on the green slope of the foss to cool
himself. He had been riding many hours in a burning sun, and wanted
cooling. He attracted everybody's attention on his arrival by his
appearance: middle-aged, with good features and curly brown hair and
beard, but huge--one of the biggest men I had ever seen; his weight
could not have been under about seventeen stone. Sitting or reclining
on the grass, he fell asleep, and rolling down the slope fell with a
tremendous splash into the water, which was about six feet deep. So
loud was the splash that it was heard by some of the men at work in
the barn, and running out to ascertain the cause, they found out what
had happened. The man had gone under and did not rise; with a good
deal of trouble he was raised up and drawn with ropes to the top of
the bank.

I gazed on him lying motionless, to all appearances stone dead--the
huge, ox-like man I had seen less than an hour ago, when he had
excited our wonder at his great size and strength, and now still in
death--dead as old Caesar under the ground with the grass growing over
him! Meanwhile the men who had hauled him out were busy with him,
turning him over and rubbing his body, and after about twelve or
fifteen minutes there was a gasp and signs of returning life, and by
and by he opened his eyes. The dead man was alive again; yet the shock
to me was just as great and the effect as lasting as if he had been
truly dead.

Another instance which will bring me down to the end of my sixth year
and the conclusion of this sad chapter. At this time we had a girl in
the house, whose sweet face is one of a little group of half a dozen
which I remember most vividly. She was a niece of our shepherd's wife,
an Argentine woman married to an Englishman, and came to us to look
after the smaller children. She was nineteen years old, a pale, slim,
pretty girl, with large dark eyes and abundant black hair. Margarita
had the sweetest smile imaginable, the softest voice and gentlest
manner, and was so much loved by everybody in the house that she was
like one of the family. Unhappily she was consumptive, and after a few
months had to be sent back to her aunt. Their little place was only
half a mile or so from the house, and every day my mother visited her,
doing all that was possible with such skill and remedies as she
possessed to give her ease, and providing her with delicacies. The
girl did not want a priest to visit her and prepare her for death; she
worshipped her mistress, and wished to be of the same faith, and in
the end she died a pervert or convert, according to this or that
person's point of view.

The day after her death we children were taken to see our beloved
Margarita for the last time; but when we arrived at the door, and the
others following my mother went in, I alone hung back. They came out
and tried to persuade me to enter, even to pull me in, and described
her appearance to excite my curiosity. She was lying all in white,
with her black hair combed out and loose, on her white bed, with our
flowers on her breast and at her sides, and looked very, very
beautiful. It was all in vain. To look on Margarita dead was more than
I could bear. I was told that only her body of clay was dead--the
beautiful body we had come to say good bye to; that her soul--she
herself, our loved Margarita--was alive and happy, far, far happier
than any person could ever be on this earth; that when her end was
near she had smiled very sweetly, and assured them that all fear of
death had left her--that God was taking her to Himself. Even this was
not enough to make me face the awful sight of Margarita dead; the very
thought of it was an intolerable weight on my heart; but it was not
grief that gave me this sensation, much as I grieved; it was solely my
fear of death.




CHAPTER IV

THE PLANTATION

Living with trees--Winter violets--The house is made habitable--Red
willow--Scissor-tail and carrion-hawk--Lombardy poplars-Black acacia--
Other trees--The foss or moat--Rats--A trial of strength with an
armadillo--Opossums living with a snake--Alfalfa field and butterflies
--Cane brake---Weeds and fennel--Peach trees in blossom--Paroquets--
Singing of a field finch--Concert-singing in birds--Old John--Cow-
birds' singing--Arrival of summer migrants.



I remember--better than any orchard, grove, or wood I have ever
entered or seen, do I remember that shady oasis of trees at my new
home on the illimitable grassy plain. Up till now I had never lived
with trees excepting those twenty-five I have told about and that
other one which was called _el arbol_ because it was the only tree of
its kind in all the land. Here there were hundreds, thousands of
trees, and to my childish unaccustomed eyes it was like a great
unexplored forest. There were no pines, firs, nor eucalyptus (unknown
in the country then), nor evergreens of any kind; the trees being all
deciduous were leafless now in mid-winter, but even so it was to me a
wonderful experience to be among them, to feel and smell their rough
moist bark stained green with moss, and to look up at the blue sky
through the network of interlacing twigs. And spring with foliage and
blossom would be with us by and by, in a month or two; even now in
midwinter there was a foretaste of it, and it came to us first as a
delicious fragrance in the air at one spot beside a row of old
Lombardy poplars--an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh
the heart glad to the adult. Here at the roots of the poplars there
was a bed or carpet of round leaves which we knew well, and putting
the clusters apart with our hands, lo! there were the violets already
open--the dim, purple-blue, hidden violets, the earliest, sweetest, of
all flowers the most loved by children in that land, and doubtless in
many other lands.

There was more than time enough for us small children to feast on
violets and run wild in our forest; since for several weeks we were
encouraged to live out of doors as far away as we could keep from the
house where we were not wanted. For just then great alterations were
being made to render it habitable: new rooms were being added on to
the old building, wooden flooring laid over the old bricks and tiles,
and the half-rotten thatch, a haunt of rats and the home of centipedes
and of many other hybernating creeping things, was being stripped off
to be replaced by a clean healthy wooden roof. For me it was no
hardship to be sent away to make my playground in that wooded
wonderland. The trees, both fruit and shade, were of many kinds, and
belonged to two widely-separated periods. The first were the old trees
planted by some tree-loving owner a century or more before our time,
and the second the others which had been put in a generation or two
later to fill up some gaps and vacant places and for the sake of a
greater variety.

The biggest of the old trees, which I shall describe first, was a red
willow growing by itself within forty yards of the house. This is a
native tree, and derives its specific name _rubra,_ as well as its
vernacular name, from the reddish colour of the rough bark. It grows
to a great size, like the black poplar, but has long narrow leaves
like those of the weeping willow. In summer I was never tired of
watching this tree, since high up in one of the branches, which in
those days seemed to me "so close against the sky," a scissor-tail
tyrant-bird always had its nest, and this high open exposed nest was a
constant attraction to the common brown carrion-hawk, called
_chimango_--a hawk with the carrion-crow's habit of perpetually
loitering about in search of eggs and fledglings.

The scissor-tail is one of the most courageous of that hawk-hating,
violent-tempered tyrant-bird family, and every time a _chimango_
appeared, which was about forty times a day, he would sally out to
attack him in mid-air with amazing fury. The marauder driven off, he
would return to the tree to utter his triumphant rattling castanet-
like notes and (no doubt) to receive the congratulations of his mate;
then to settle down again to watch the sky for the appearance of the
next _chimango_.

A second red willow was the next largest tree in the plantation, but
of this willow I shall have more to say in a later chapter.

The tall Lombardy poplars were the most numerous of the older trees,
and grew in double rows, forming walks or avenues, on three sides of
the entire enclosed ground. There was also a cross-row of poplars
dividing the gardens and buildings from the plantation, and these were
the favourite nesting-trees of two of our best-loved birds--the
beautiful little goldfinch or Argentine siskin, and the bird called
firewood-gatherer by the natives on account of the enormous collection
of sticks which formed the nest.

Between the border poplar walk and the foss outside, there grew a
single row of trees of a very different kind--the black acacia, a rare
and singular tree, and of all our trees this one made the strongest
and sharpest impression on my mind as well as flesh, pricking its
image in me, so to speak. It had probably been planted originally by
the early first planter, and, I imagine, experimentally, as a possible
improvement on the wide-spreading disorderly aloe, a favourite with
the first settlers; but it is a wild lawless plant and had refused to
make a proper hedge. Some of these acacias had remained small and were
like old scraggy bushes, some were dwarfish trees, while others had
sprung up like the fabled bean-stalk and were as tall as the poplars
that grew side by side with them. These tall specimens had slender
boles and threw out their slender horizontal branches of great length
on all sides, from the roots to the crown, the branches and the bole
itself being armed with thorns two to four inches long, hard as iron,
black or chocolate-brown, polished and sharp as needles; and to make
itself more formidable every long thorn had two smaller thorns growing
out of it near the base, so that it was in shape like a round tapering
dagger with a crossguard to the handle. It was a terrible tree to
climb, yet, when a little older. I had to climb it a thousand times,
since there were certain birds which would make their nests in it,
often as high up as they could, and some of these were birds that laid
beautiful eggs, such as those of the Guira cuckoo, the size of
pullets' eggs, of the purest turquoise blue flecked with snowy white.

Among our old or ancient trees the peach was the favourite of the
whole house on account of the fruit it gave us in February and March,
also later, in April and May, when what we called our winter peach
ripened. Peach, quince, and cherry were the three favourite fruit-
trees in the colonial times, and all three were found in some of the
quintas or orchards of the old estancia houses. We had a score of
quince trees, with thick gnarled trunks and old twisted branches like
rams' horns, but the peach trees numbered about four to five hundred
and grew well apart from one another, and were certainly the largest I
have ever seen. Their size was equal to that of the oldest and largest
cherry trees one sees in certain favoured spots in Southern England,
where they grow not in close formation but wide apart with ample room
for the branches to spread on all sides.

The trees planted by a later generation, both shade and fruit, were
more varied. The most abundant was the mulberry, of which there were
many hundreds, mostly in rows, forming walks, and albeit of the same
species as our English mulberry they differed from it in the great
size and roughness of the leaves and in producing fruit of a much
smaller size. The taste of the fruit was also less luscious and it was
rarely eaten by our elders. We small children feasted on it, but it
was mostly for the birds. The mulberry was looked on as a shade, not a
fruit tree, and the other two most important shade trees, in number,
were the _acacia blanca,_ or false acacia, and the paradise tree or
pride of China. Besides these there was a row of eight or ten
ailanthus trees, or tree of heaven as it is sometimes called, with
tall white smooth trunk crowned with a cluster of palm-like foliage.
There was also a modern orchard, containing pear, apple, plum, and
cherry trees.

The entire plantation, the buildings included, comprising an area of
eight or nine acres, was surrounded by an immense ditch or foss about
twelve feet deep and twenty to thirty feet wide. It was undoubtedly
very old and had grown in width owing to the crumbling away of the
earth at the sides. This in time would have filled and almost
obliterated it, but at intervals of two or three years, at a time when
it was dry, quantities of earth were dug up from the bottom and thrown
on the mound inside. It was in appearance something like a prehistoric
earthwork. In winter as a rule it became full of water and was a
favourite haunt, especially at night, of flocks of teal, also duck of
a few other kinds--widgeon, pintail, and shoveller. In summer it
gradually dried up, but a few pools of muddy water usually remained
through all the hot season and were haunted by the solitary or summer
snipe, one of the many species of sandpiper and birds of that family
which bred in the northern hemisphere and wintered with us when it was
our summer. Once the water had gone down in the moat, long grass and
herbage would spring up and flourish on its sloping sides, and the
rats and other small beasties would return and riddle it with
innumerable burrows.

The rats were killed down from time to time with the "smoking
machine," which pumped the fumes of sulphur, bad tobacco, and other
deadly substances into their holes and suffocated them; and I recall
two curious incidents during these crusades. One day I was standing on
the mound at the side of the moat or foss some forty yards from where
the men were at work, when an armadillo bolted from his earth and
running to the very spot where I was standing began vigorously digging
to escape by burying himself in the soil. Neither men nor dogs had
seen him, and I at once determined to capture him unaided by any one
and imagined it would prove a very easy task. Accordingly I laid hold
of his black bone-cased tail with both hands and began tugging to get
him off the ground, bait couldn't move him. He went on digging
furiously, getting deeper and deeper into the earth, and I soon found
that instead of my pulling him out he was pulling me in after him. It
hurt my small-boy pride to think that an animal no bigger than a cat
was going to beat me in a trial of strength, and this made me hold on
more tenaciously than ever and tug and strain more violently, until
not to lose him I had to go flat down on the ground. But it was all
for nothing: first my hands, then my aching arms were carried down
into the earth, and I was forced to release my hold and get up to rid
myself of the mould he had been throwing up into my face and all over
my head, neck, and shoulders.

In the other case, one of my older brothers seeing the dogs sniffing
and scratching at a large burrow, took a spade and dug a couple of
feet into the soil and found an adult black-and-white opossum with
eight or nine half-grown young lying together in a nest of dry grass,
and, wonderful to tell, a large venomous snake coiled up amongst them.
The snake was the dreaded _vivora de la cruz_, as the gauchos call it,
a pit-viper of the same family as the fer-de-lance, the bush-master,
and the rattlesnake. It was about three feet long, very thick in
proportion, and with broad head and blunt tail. It came forth hissing
and striking blindly right and left when the dogs pulled the opossums
out, but was killed with a blow of the spade without injuring the
dogs.

This was the first _serpent with a cross_ I had seen, and the sight of
the thick blunt body of a greenish-grey colour blotched with dull
black, and the broad flat head with its stony-white lidless eyes, gave
me a thrill of horror. In after years I became familiar with it and
could even venture to pick it up without harm to myself, just as now
in England I pick up the less dangerous adder when I come upon one.
The wonder to us was that this extremely irascible and venomous
serpent should be living in a nest with a large family of opossums,
for it must be borne in mind that the opossum is a rapacious and an
exceedingly savage-tempered beast.

This then was the world in which I moved and had my being, within the
limits of the old rat-haunted foss among the enchanted trees. But it
was not the trees only that made it so fascinating, it had open spaces
and other forms of vegetation which were exceedingly attractive too.

There was a field of alfalfa about half an acre in size, which
flowered three times a year, and during the flowering time it drew the
butterflies from all the surrounding plain with its luscious bean-like
fragrance, until the field was full of them, red, black, yellow, and
white butterflies, fluttering in flocks round every blue spike.

Canes, too, in a large patch or "brake" as we called it, grew at
another spot; a graceful plant about twenty-five feet high, in
appearance unlike the bamboo, as the long pointed leaves were of a
glaucous blue-green colour. The canes were valuable to us as they
served as fishing-rods when we were old enough for that sport, and
were also used as lances when we rode forth to engage in mimic battles
on the plain. But they also had an economic value, as they were used
by the natives when making their thatched roofs as a substitute for
the bamboo cane, which cost much more as it had to be imported from
other countries. Accordingly at the end of the summer, after the cane
had flowered, they were all cut down, stripped of their leaves, and
taken away in bundles, and we were then deprived till the following
season of the pleasure of hunting for the tallest and straightest
canes to cut them down and strip off leaves and bark to make beautiful
green polished rods for our sports.

There were other open spaces covered with a vegetation almost as
interesting as the canes and the trees: this was where what were
called "weeds" were allowed to flourish. Here were the thorn-apple,
chenopodium, sow-thistle, wild mustard, redweed, viper's bugloss, and
others, both native and introduced, in dense thickets five or six feet
high. It was difficult to push one's way through these thickets, and
one was always in dread of treading on a snake. At another spot fennel
flourished by itself, as if it had some mysterious power, perhaps its
peculiar smell, of keeping other plants at a proper distance. It
formed quite a thicket, and grew to a height of ten or twelve feet.
This spot was a favourite haunt of mine, as it was in a waste place at
the furthest point from the house, a wild solitary spot where I could
spend long hours by myself watching the birds. But I also loved the
fennel for itself, its beautiful green feathery foliage and the smell
of it, also the taste, so that whenever I visited that secluded spot I
would rub the crushed leaves in my palms and chew the small twigs for
their peculiar fennel flavour.

Winter made a great change in the plantation, since it not only
stripped the trees of their leaves but swept away all that rank
herbage, the fennel included, allowing the grass to grow again. The
large luxuriantly-growing annuals also disappeared from the garden and
all about the house, the big four-o'clock bushes with deep red stems
and wealth of crimson blossoms, and the morning-glory convolvulus with
its great blue trumpets, climbing over and covering every available
place with its hop-like mass of leaves and abundant blooms. My life in
the plantation in winter was a constant watching for spring. May,
June, and July were the leafless months, but not wholly songless. On
any genial and windless day of sunshine in winter a few swallows would
reappear, nobody could guess from where, to spend the bright hours
wheeling like house-martins about the house, revisiting their old
breeding-holes under the eaves, and uttering their lively little
rippling songs, as of water running in a pebbly stream. When the sun
declined they would vanish, to be seen no more until we had another
perfect spring-like day.

On such days in July and on any mild misty morning, standing on the
mound within the moat I would listen to the sounds from the wide open
plain, and they were sounds of spring--the constant drumming and
rhythmic cries of the spur-wing lapwings engaged in their social
meetings and "dances," and the song of the pipit soaring high up and
pouring out its thick prolonged strains as it slowly floated downwards
to the earth.

In August the peach blossomed. The great old trees standing wide apart
on their grassy carpet, barely touching each other with the tips of
their widest branches, were like great mound-shaped clouds of
exquisite rosy-pink blossoms. There was then nothing in the universe
which could compare in loveliness to that spectacle. I was a
worshipper of trees at this season, and I remember my shocked and
indignant feeling when one day a flock of green paroquets came
screaming down and alighted on one of the trees near me. This paroquet
never bred in our plantation; they were occasional visitors from their
home in an old grove about nine miles away, and their visits were
always a great pleasure to us. On this occasion I was particularly
glad, because the birds had elected to settle on a tree close to where
I was standing. But the blossoms thickly covering every twig annoyed
the parrots, as they could not find space enough to grasp a twig
without grasping its flower as well; so what did the birds do in their
impatience but begin stripping the blossoms off the branches on which
they were perched with their sharp beaks, so rapidly that the flowers
came down in a pink shower, and in this way in half a minute every
bird made a twig bare where he could sit perched at ease. There were
millions of blossoms; only one here and there would ever be a peach,
yet it vexed me to see the parrots cut them off in that heedless way:
it was a desecration, a crime even in a bird.

Even now when I recall the sight of those old flowering peach trees,
with trunks as thick as a man's body, and the huge mounds or clouds of
myriads of roseate blossoms seen against the blue ethereal sky, I am
not sure that I have seen anything in my life more perfectly
beautiful. Yet this great beauty was but half the charm I found in
these trees: the other half was in the bird-music that issued from
them. It was the music of but one kind of bird, a small greenish
yellow field finch, in size like the linnet though with a longer and
slimmer body, and resembling a linnet too in its general habits. Thus,
in autumn it unites in immense flocks, which keep together during the
winter months and sing in concert and do not break up until the return
of the breeding season. In a country where there were no bird-catchers
or human persecutors of small birds, the flocks of this finch, called
_Misto_ by the natives, were far larger than any linnet flocks ever
seen in England. The flock we used to have about our plantation
numbered many thousands, and you would see them like a cloud wheeling
about in the air, then suddenly dropping and vanishing from sight in
the grass, where they fed on small seeds and tender leaves and buds.
On going to the spot they would rise with a loud humming sound of
innumerable wings, and begin rushing and whirling about again, chasing
each other in play and chirping, and presently all would drop to the
ground again.

In August, when the spring begins to infect their blood, they repair
to the trees at intervals during the day, where they sit perched and
motionless for an hour or longer, all singing together. This singing
time was when the peach trees were in blossom, and it was invariably
in the peach trees they settled and could be seen, the little yellow
birds in thousands amid the millions of pink blossoms, pouring out
their wonderful music.

One of the most delightful bird sounds or noises to be heard in
England is the concert-singing of a flock of several hundreds, and
sometimes of a thousand or more linnets in September and October, and
even later in the year, before these great congregations have been
broken up or have migrated. The effect produced by the small field
finch of the pampas was quite different. The linnet has a little
twittering song with breaks in it and small chirping sounds, and when
a great multitude of birds sing together the sound at a distance of
fifty or sixty yards is as of a high wind among the trees, but on a
nearer approach the mass of sound resolves itself into a tangle of
thousands of individual sounds, resembling that of a great concourse
of starlings at roosting time, but more musical in character. It is as
if hundreds of fairy minstrels were all playing on stringed and wind
instruments of various forms, every one intent on his own performance
without regard to the others.

The field finch does not twitter or chirp and has no break or sudden
change in his song, which is composed of a series of long-drawn notes,
the first somewhat throaty but growing clearer and brighter towards
the end, so that when thousands sing together it is as if they sang in
perfect unison, the effect on the hearing being like that on the sight
of flowing water or of rain when the multitudinous falling drops
appear as silvery-grey lines on the vision. It is an exceedingly
beautiful effect, and so far as I know unique among birds that have
the habit of singing in large companies.

I remember that we had a carpenter in those days, an Englishman named
John, a native of Cumberland, who used to make us laugh at his slow
heavy way when, after asking him some simple question, we had to wait
until he put down his tools and stared at us for about twenty seconds
before replying. One of my elder brothers had dubbed him the
"Cumberland boor." I remember one day on going to listen to the choir
of finches in the blossoming orchard, I was surprised to see John
standing near the trees doing nothing, and as I came up to him he
turned towards me with a look which astonished me on his dull old
face--that look which perhaps one of my readers has by chance seen on
the face of a religious mystic in a moment of exaltation. "Those
little birds! I never heard anything like it!" he exclaimed, then
trudged off to his work. Like most Englishmen, he had, no doubt, a
vein of poetic feeling hidden away somewhere in his soul.

We also had the other kind of concert-singing by another species in
the plantation. This was the common purple cow-bird, one of the
Troupial family, exclusively American, but supposed to have affinities
with the starlings of the Old World. This cow-bird is parasitical
(like the European cuckoo) in its breeding habits, and having no
domestic affairs of its own to attend to it lives in flocks all the
year round, leading an idle vagabond life. The male is of a uniform
deep purple-black, the female a drab or mouse-colour. The cow-birds
were excessively numerous among the trees in summer, perpetually
hunting for nests in which to deposit their eggs: they fed on the
ground out on the plain and were often in such big flocks as to look
like a huge black carpet spread out on the green sward. On a rainy day
they did not feed: they congregated on the trees in thousands and sang
by the hour. Their favourite gathering-place at such times was behind
the house, where the trees grew pretty thick and were sheltered on two
sides by the black acacias and double rows of Lombardy poplars,
succeeded by double rows of large mulberry trees, forming walks, and
these by pear, apple and cherry trees. From whichever side the wind
blew it was calm here, and during the heaviest rain the birds would
sit here in their thousands, pouring out a continuous torrent of song,
which resembled the noise produced by thousands of starlings at
roosting-time, but was louder and differed somewhat in character owing
to the peculiar song of the cow-bird, which begins with hollow
guttural sounds, followed by a burst of loud clear ringing notes.

These concert-singers, the little green and yellow field finch and the
purple cow-bird, were with us all the year round, with many others
which it would take a whole chapter to tell of. When, in July and
August, I watched for the coming spring, it was the migrants, the
birds that came annually to us from the far north, that chiefly
attracted me. Before their arrival the bloom was gone from the peach
trees, and the choir of countless little finches broken up and
scattered all over the plain. Then the opening leaves were watched,
and after the willows the first and best-loved were the poplars.
During all the time they were opening, when they were still a
yellowish-green in colour, the air was full of the fragrance, but not
satisfied with that I would crush and rub the new small leaves in my
hands and on my face to get the delicious balsamic smell in fuller
measure. And of all the trees, after the peach, the poplars appeared
to feel the new season with the greatest intensity, for it seemed to
me that they felt the sunshine even as I did, and they expressed it in
their fragrance just as the peach and other trees did in their
flowers. And it was also expressed in the new sound they gave out to
the wind. The change was really wonderful when the rows on rows of
immensely tall trees which for months had talked and cried in that
strange sibilant language, rising to shrieks when a gale was blowing,
now gave out a larger volume of sound, more continuous, softer,
deeper, and like the wash of the sea on a wide shore.

The other trees would follow, and by and by all would be in full
foliage once more, and ready to receive their strange beautiful guests
from the tropical forests in the distant north.

The most striking of the newcomers was the small scarlet tyrant-bird,
which is about the size of our spotted flycatcher; all a shining
scarlet except the black wings and tail. This bird had a delicate
bell-like voice, but it was the scarlet colour shining amid the green
foliage which made me delight in it above all other birds. Yet the
humming-bird, which arrived at the same time, was wonderfully
beautiful too, especially when he flew close to your face and remained
suspended motionless on mist-like wings for a few moments, his
feathers looking and glittering like minute emerald scales.

Then came other tyrant-birds and the loved swallows--the house-
swallow, which resembles the English house-martin, the large purple
martin, the _Golodrina domestica_, and the brown tree-martin. Then,
too, came the yellow-billed cuckoo--the _kowe-kowe_ as it is called
from its cry. Year after year I listened for its deep mysterious call,
which sounded like _gow-gow-gow-gow-gow,_ in late September, even as
the small English boy listens for the call of _his_ cuckoo, in April;
and the human-like character of the sound, together with the
startlingly impressive way in which it was enunciated, always produced
the idea that it was something more than a mere bird call. Later, in
October when the weather was hot, I would hunt for the nest, a frail
platform made of a few sticks with four or five oval eggs like those
of the turtledove in size and of a pale green colour.

There were other summer visitors, but I must not speak of them as this
chapter contains too much on that subject. My feathered friends were
so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my
first years a book about birds and little else. There remains, too,
much more to say about the plantation, the trees and their effect on
my mind, also some adventures I met with, some with birds and others
with snakes, which will occupy two or three or more chapters later on.




CHAPTER V

ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN

Appearance of a green level land--Cardoon and giant thistles--Villages
of the Vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent--Groves and plantations seen
like islands on the wide level plains--Trees planted by the early
colonists--Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral
people--Houses as part of the landscape--Flesh diet of the gauchos--
Summer change in the aspect of the plain--The water-like mirage--The
giant thistle and a "thistle year"--Fear of fires--An incident at a
fire--The _pampero_, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles
--Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals--A great pampero
storm--Big hailstones--Damage caused by hail--Zango, an old horse,
killed--Zango and his master.



As a small boy of six but well able to ride bare-backed at a fast
gallop without falling off, I invite the reader, mounted too, albeit
on nothing but an imaginary animal, to follow me a league or so from
the gate to some spot where the land rises to a couple or three or
four feet above the surrounding level. There, sitting on our horses,
we shall command a wider horizon than even the tallest man would have
standing on his own legs, and in this way get a better idea of the
district in which ten of the most impressionable years of my life,
from five to fifteen, were spent.

We see all round us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty
blue colour where the crystal-blue dome of the sky rests on the level
green world. Green in late autumn, winter, and spring, or say from
April to November, but not all like a green lawn or field: there were
smooth areas where sheep had pastured, but the surface varied greatly
and was mostly more or less rough. In places the land as far as one
could see was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles, or wild
artichoke, of a bluish or grey-green colour, while in other places the
giant thistle flourished, a plant with big variegated green and white
leaves, and standing when in flower six to ten feet high.

There were other breaks and roughnesses on that flat green expanse
caused by the _vizcachas,_ a big rodent the size of a hare, a mighty
burrower in the earth. _Vizcachas_ swarmed in all that district where
they have now practically been exterminated, and lived in villages,
called _vizcacheras,_ composed of thirty or forty huge burrows--about
the size of half a dozen badgers' earths grouped together. The earth
thrown out of these diggings formed a mound, and being bare of
vegetation it appeared in the landscape as a clay-coloured spot on the
green surface. Sitting on a horse one could count a score to fifty or
sixty of these mounds or _vizcacheras_ on the surrounding plain.

On all this visible earth there were no fences, and no trees excepting
those which had been planted at the old estancia houses, and these
being far apart the groves and plantations looked like small islands
of trees, or mounds, blue in the distance, on the great plain or
pampa. They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy
poplar, which of all trees is the easiest one to grow in that land.
And these trees at the estancias or cattle-ranches were, at the time I
am writing about, almost invariably aged and in many instances in an
advanced state of decay. It is interesting to know how these old
groves and plantations ever came into existence in a land where at
that time there was practically no tree-planting.

The first colonists who made their homes in this vast vacant space,
called the pampas, came from a land where the people are accustomed to
sit in the shade of trees, where corn and wine and oil are supposed to
be necessaries, and where there is salad in the garden. Naturally they
made gardens and planted trees, both for shade and fruit, wherever
they built themselves a house on the pampas, and no doubt for two or
three generations they tried to live as people live in Spain, in the
rural districts. But now the main business of their lives was cattle-
raising, and as the cattle roamed at will over the vast plains and
were more like wild than domestic animals, it was a life on horseback.
They could no longer dig or plough the earth or protect their crops
from insects and birds and their own animals. They gave up their oil
and wine and bread and lived on flesh alone. They sat in the shade and
ate the fruit of trees planted by their fathers or their great-
grandfathers until the trees died of old age, or were blown down or
killed by the cattle, and there was no more shade and fruit.

It thus came about that the Spanish colonists on the pampas declined
from the state of an agricultural people to that of an exclusively
pastoral and hunting one; and later, when the Spanish yoke, as it was
called, was shaken off, the incessant throat-cutting wars of the
various factions, which were like the wars of "crows and pies," except
that knives were used instead of beaks, confirmed and sunk them deeper
in their wild and barbarous manner of life.

Thus, too, the tree-clumps on the pampas were mostly remains of a
vanished past. To these clumps or plantations we shall return later on
when I come to describe the home life of some of our nearest
neighbours; here the houses only, with or without trees growing about
them, need be mentioned as parts of the landscape. The houses were
always low and scarcely visible at a distance of a mile and a half:
one always had to stoop on entering a door. They were built of burnt
or unburnt brick, more often clay and brushwood, and thatched with
sedges or bulrushes. At some of the better houses there would be a
small garden, a few yards of soil protected in some way from the
poultry and animals, in which a few flowers and herbs were grown,
especially parsley, rue, sage, tansy, and horehound. But there was no
other cultivation attempted, and no vegetables were eaten except
onions and garlic, which were bought at the stores, with bread, rice,
mate tea, oil, vinegar, raisins, cinnamon, pepper, cummin seed, and
whatever else they could afford to season their meat-pies or give a
flavour to the monotonous diet of cow's flesh and mutton and pig.
Almost the only game eaten was ostrich, armadillo, and tinamou (the
partridge of the country), which the boys could catch by snaring or
running them down. Wild duck, plover, and such birds they rarely or
never tasted, as they could not shoot; and as to the big rodent, the
vizcacha, which swarmed everywhere, no gaucho would touch its flesh,
although to my taste it was better than rabbit.

The summer change in the aspect of the plain would begin in November:
the dead dry grass would take on a yellowish-brown colour, the giant
thistle a dark rust brown, and at this season, from November to
February, the grove or plantation at the estancia house, with its deep
fresh unchanging verdure and shade, was a veritable refuge on the vast
flat yellow earth. It was then, when the water-courses were gradually
drying up and the thirsty days coming to flocks and herds, that the
mocking illusion of the mirage was constantly about us. Quite early in
spring, on any warm cloudless day, this water-mirage was visible, and
was like the appearance on a hot summer's day of the atmosphere in
England when the air near the surface becomes visible, when one sees
it dancing before one's eyes, like thin wavering and ascending tongues
of flame--crystal-clear flames mixed with flames of a faint pearly or
silver grey. On the level and hotter pampas this appearance is
intensified, and the faintly visible wavering flames change to an
appearance of lakelets or sheets of water looking as if ruffled by the
wind and shining like molten silver in the sun. The resemblance to
water is increased when there are groves and buildings on the horizon,
which look like dark blue islands or banks in the distance, while the
cattle and horses feeding not far from the spectator appear to be
wading knee or belly deep in the brilliant water.

The aspect of the plain was different in what was called a "thistle
year," when the giant thistles, which usually occupied definite areas
or grew in isolated patches, suddenly sprang up everywhere, and for a
season covered most of the land. In these luxuriant years the plants
grew as thick as sedges and bulrushes in their beds, and were taller
than usual, attaining a height of about ten feet. The wonder was to
see a plant which throws out leaves as large as those of the rhubarb,
with its stems so close together as to be almost touching. Standing
among the thistles in the growing season one could in a sense _hear_
them growing, as the huge leaves freed themselves with a jerk from a
cramped position, producing a crackling sound. It was like the
crackling sound of the furze seed-vessels which one hears in June in
England, only much louder.

To the gaucho who lives half his day on his horse and loves his
freedom as much as a wild bird, a thistle year was a hateful period of
restraint. His small, low-roofed, mud house was then too like a cage
to him, as the tall thistles hemmed it in and shut out the view on all
sides. On his horse he was compelled to keep to the narrow cattle
track and to draw in or draw up his legs to keep them from the long
pricking spines. In those distant primitive days the gaucho if a poor
man was usually shod with nothing but a pair of iron spurs.

By the end of November the thistles would be dead, and their huge
hollow stalks as dry and light as the shaft of a bird's feather--a
feather-shaft twice as big round as a broomstick and six to eight feet
long. The roots were not only dead but turned to dust in the ground,
so that one could push a stalk from its place with one finger, but it
would not fall since it was held up by scores of other sticks all
round it, and these by hundreds more, and the hundreds by thousands
and millions. The thistle dead was just as great a nuisance as the
thistle living, and in this dead dry condition they would sometimes
stand all through December and January when the days were hottest and
the danger of fire was ever present to people's minds. At any moment a
careless spark from a cigarette might kindle a dangerous blaze. At
such times the sight of smoke in the distance would cause every man
who saw it to mount his horse and fly to the danger-spot, where an
attempt would be made to stop the fire by making a broad path in the
thistles some fifty to a hundred yards ahead of it. One way to make
the path was to lasso and kill a few sheep from the nearest flock and
drag them up and down at a gallop through the dense thistles until a
broad space was clear where the flames could be stamped and beaten out
with horse-rugs. But sheep to be used in this way were not always to
be found on the spot, and even when a broad space could be made, if a
hot north wind was blowing it would carry showers of sparks and
burning sticks to the other side and the fire would travel on.

I remember going to one of these big fires when I was about twelve
years old. It broke out a few miles from home and was travelling in
our direction; I saw my father mount and dash off, but it took me half
an hour or more to catch a horse for myself, so that I arrived late on
the scene. A fresh fire had broken out a quarter of a mile in advance
of the main one, where most of the men were fighting the flames; and
to this spot I went first, and found some half a dozen neighbours who
had just arrived on the scene. Before we started operations about
twenty men from the main fire came galloping up to us. They had made
their path, but seeing this new fire so far ahead, had left it in
despair after an hour's hard hot work, and had flown to the new danger
spot. As they came up I looked in wonder at one who rode ahead, a tall
black man in his shirt sleeves who was a stranger to me. "Who is this
black fellow, I wonder?" said I to myself, and just then he shouted to
me in English, "Hullo, my boy, what are you doing here?" It was my
father; an hour's fighting with the flames in a cloud of black ashes
in that burning sun and wind had made him look like a pure-blooded
negro!

During December and January when this desert world of thistles dead
and dry as tinder continued standing, a menace and danger, the one
desire and hope of every one was for the _pampero_--the south-west
wind, which in hot weather is apt to come with startling suddenness,
and to blow with extraordinary violence. And it would come at last,
usually in the afternoon of a close hot day, after the north wind had
been blowing persistently for days with a breath as from a furnace. At
last the hateful wind would drop and a strange gloom that was not from
any cloud would cover the sky; and by and by a cloud would rise, a
dull dark cloud as of a mountain becoming visible on the plain at an
enormous distance. In a little while it would cover half the sky, and
there would be thunder and lightning and a torrent of rain, and at the
same moment the wind would strike and roar in the bent-down trees and
shake the house. And in an hour or two it would perhaps be all over,
and next morning the detested thistles would be gone, or at all events
levelled to the ground.

After such a storm the sense of relief to the horseman, now able to
mount and gallop forth in any direction over the wide plain and see
the earth once more spread out for miles before him, was like that of
a prisoner released from his cell, or of the sick man, when he at
length repairs his vigour lost and breathes and walks again.

To this day it gives me a thrill, or perhaps it would be safer to say
the ghost of a vanished thrill, when I remember the relief it was in
my case, albeit I was never so tied to a horse, so parasitical, as the
gaucho, after one of these great thistle-levelling _pampero_ winds. It
was a rare pleasure to ride out and gallop my horse over wide brown
stretches of level land, to hear his hard hoofs crushing the hollow
desiccated stalks covering the earth in millions like the bones of a
countless host of perished foes. It was a queer kind of joy, a mixed
feeling with a dash of gratified revenge to give it a sharp savour.

After all this abuse of the giant thistle, the _Cardo asnal_ of the
natives and _Carduus mariana_ of the botanists, it may sound odd to
say that a "thistle year" was a blessing in some ways. It was an
anxious year on account of the fear of fire, and a season of great
apprehension too when reports of robberies and other crimes were
abroad in the land, especially for the poor women who were left so
much alone in their low-roofed hovels, shut in by the dense prickly
growth. But a thistle year was called a fat year, since the animals--
cattle, horses, sheep, and even pigs--browsed freely on the huge
leaves and soft sweetish-tasting stems, and were in excellent
condition. The only drawbacks were that the riding-horses lost
strength as they gained in fat, and cow's milk didn't taste nice.

The best and fattest time would come when the hardening plant was no
longer fit to eat and the flowers began to shed their seed. Each
flower, in size like a small coffee-cup, would open out in a white
mass and shed its scores of silvery balls, and these when freed of
heavy seed would float aloft in the wind, and the whole air as far as
one could see would be filled with millions and myriads of floating
balls. The fallen seed was so abundant as to cover the ground under
the dead but still standing plants. It is a long, slender seed, about
the size of a grain of Carolina rice, of a greenish or bluish-grey
colour, spotted with black. The sheep feasted on it, using their
mobile and extensible upper lips like a crumb-brush to gather it into
their mouths. Horses gathered it in the same way, but the cattle were
out of it, either because they could not learn the trick, or because
their lips and tongues cannot be used to gather a crumb-like food.
Pigs, however, flourished on it, and to birds, domestic and wild, it
was even more than to the mammals.

In conclusion of this chapter I will return for a page or two to the
subject of the _pampero_, the south-west wind of the Argentine pampas,
to describe the greatest of all the great _pampero_ storms I have
witnessed. This was when I was in my seventh year.

The wind blowing from this quarter is not like the south-west wind of
the North Atlantic and Britain, a warm wind laden with moisture from
hot tropical seas--that great wind which Joseph Conrad in his _Mirror
of the Sea_ has personified in one of the sublimest passages in recent
literature. It is an excessively violent wind, as all mariners know
who have encountered it on the South Atlantic off the River Plate, but
it is cool and dry, although it frequently comes with great thunder-
clouds and torrents of rain and hail. The rain may last half-an-hour
to half-a-day, but when over the sky is without a vapour and a spell
of fine weather ensues.

It was in sultry summer weather, and towards evening all of us boys
and girls went out for a ramble on the plain, and were about a quarter
of a mile from home when a blackness appeared in the south-west, and
began to cover the sky in that quarter so rapidly that, taking alarm,
we started homewards as fast as we could run. But the stupendous
slaty-black darkness, mixed with yellow clouds of dust, gained on us,
and before we got to the gate the terrified screams of wild birds
reached our ears, and glancing back we saw multitudes of gulls and
plover flying madly before the storm, trying to keep ahead of it. Then
a swarm of big dragon-flies came like a cloud over us, and was gone in
an instant, and just as we reached the gate the first big drops
splashed down in the form of liquid mud. We had hardly got indoors
before the tempest broke in its full fury, a blackness as of night, a
blended uproar of thunder and wind, blinding flashes of lightning, and
torrents of rain. Then as the first thick darkness began to pass away,
we saw that the air was white with falling hailstones of an
extraordinary size and appearance. They were big as fowls' eggs, but
not egg-shaped: they were flat, and about half-an-inch thick, and
being white, looked like little blocks or bricklets made of compressed
snow. The hail continued falling until the earth was white with them,
and in spite of their great size they were driven by the furious wind
into drifts two or three feet deep against the walls of the buildings.

It was evening and growing dark when the storm ended, but the light
next morning revealed the damage we had suffered. Pumpkins, gourds,
and water-melons were cut to pieces, and most of the vegetables,
including the Indian corn, were destroyed. The fruit trees, too, had
suffered greatly. Forty or fifty sheep had been killed outright, and
hundreds more were so much hurt that for days they went limping about
or appeared stupefied from blows on the head. Three of our heifers
were dead, and one horse--an old loved riding-horse with a history,
old Zango--the whole house was in grief at his death! He belonged
originally to a cavalry officer who had an extraordinary affection for
him--a rare thing in a land where horseflesh was too cheap, and men as
a rule careless of their animals and even cruel. The officer had spent
years in the Banda Oriental, in guerilla warfare, and had ridden Zango
in every fight in which he had been engaged. Coming back to Buenos
Ayres he brought the old horse home with him. Two or three years later
he came to my father, whom he had come to know very well, and said he
had been ordered to the upper provinces and was in great trouble about
his horse. He was twenty years old, he said, and no longer fit to be
ridden in a fight; and of all the people he knew there was but one man
in whose care he wished to leave his horse. I know, he said, that if
you will take him and promise to care for him until his old life ends,
he will be safe; and I should be happy about him--as happy as I can be
without the horse I have loved more than any other being on earth. My
father consented, and had kept the old horse for over nine years when
he was killed by the hail. He was a well-shaped dark brown animal,
with long mane and tail, but, as I knew him, always lean and old-
looking, and the chief use he was put to was for the children to take
their first riding-lessons on his back.

My parents had already experienced one great sadness on account of
Zango before his strange death. For years they had looked for a
letter, a message, from the absent officer, and had often pictured his
return and joy at finding alive still and embracing his beloved old
friend again. But he never returned, and no message came and no news
could be heard of him, and it was at last concluded that he had lost
his life in that distant part of the country, where there had been
much fighting.

To return to the hailstones. The greatest destruction had fallen on
the wild birds. Before the storm immense numbers of golden plover had
appeared and were in large flocks on the plain. One of our native boys
rode in and offered to get a sackful of plover for the table, and
getting the sack he took me up on his horse behind him. A mile or so
from home we came upon scores of dead plover lying together where they
had been in close flocks, but my companion would not pick up a dead
bird. There were others running about with one wing broken, and these
he went after, leaving me to hold his horse, and catching them would
wring their necks and drop them in the sack. When he had collected two
or three dozen he remounted and we rode back.

Later that morning we heard of one human being, a boy of six, in one
of our poor neighbours' houses, who had lost his life in a curious
way. He was standing in the middle of the room, gazing out at the
falling hail, when a hailstone, cutting through the thatched roof,
struck him on the head and killed him instantly.




CHAPTER VI

SOME BIRD ADVENTURES

Visit to a river on the pampas--A first long walk--Waterfowl--My first
sight of flamingoes--A great dove visitation--Strange tameness of the
birds--Vain attempts at putting salt on their tails--An ethical
question: When is a lie not a lie?--The carancho, a vulture-eagle--Our
pair of caranchos--Their nest in a peach tree--I am ambitious to take
their eggs--The birds' crimes--I am driven off by the birds--The nest
pulled down.



Just before my riding days began in real earnest, when I was not yet
quite confident enough to gallop off alone for miles to see the world
for myself, I had my first long walk on the plain. One of my elder
brothers invited me to accompany him to a water-course, one of the
slow-flowing shallow marshy rivers of the pampas which was but two
miles from home. The thought of the half-wild cattle we would meet
terrified me, but he was anxious for my company that day and assured
me that he could see no herd in that direction and he would be careful
to give a wide berth to anything with horns we might come upon. Then I
joyfully consented and we set out, three of us, to survey the wonders
of a great stream of running water, where bulrushes grew and large
wild birds, never seen by us at home, would be found. I had had a
glimpse of the river before, as, when driving to visit a neighbour, we
had crossed it at one of the fords and I had wished to get down and
run on its moist green low banks, and now that desire would be
gratified. It was for me a tremendously long walk, as we had to take
many a turn to avoid the patches of cardoon and giant thistles, and by
and by we came to low ground where the grass was almost waist-high and
full of flowers. It was all like an English meadow in June, when every
grass and every herb is in flower, beautiful and fragrant, but tiring
to a boy six years old to walk through. At last we came out to a
smooth grass turf, and in a little while were by the stream, which had
overflowed its banks owing to recent heavy rains and was now about
fifty yards wide. An astonishing number of birds were visible--chiefly
wild duck, a few swans, and many waders-ibises, herons, spoonbills,
and others, but the most wonderful of all were three immensely tall
white-and-rose-coloured birds, wading solemnly in a row a yard or so
apart from one another some twenty yards out from the bank. I was
amazed and enchanted at the sight, and my delight was intensified when
the leading bird stood still and, raising his head and long neck
aloft, opened and shook his wings. For the wings when open were of a
glorious crimson colour, and the bird was to me the most angel-like
creature on earth.

What were these wonderful birds? I asked of my brothers, but they
could not tell me. They said they had never seen birds like them
before, and later I found that the flamingo was not known in our
neighbourhood as the water-courses were not large enough for it, but
that it could be seen in flocks at a lake less than a day's journey
from our home.

It was not for several years that I had an opportunity of seeing the
bird again; later I have seen it scores and hundreds of times, at rest
or flying, at all times of the day and in all states of the
atmosphere, in all its most beautiful aspects, as when at sunset or in
the early morning it stands motionless in the still water with its
clear image reflected below; or when seen flying in flocks--seen from
some high bank beneath one--moving low over the blue water in a long
crimson line or half moon, the birds at equal distances apart, their
wing-tips all but touching; but the delight in these spectacles has
never equalled in degree that which I experienced on this occasion
when I was six years old.

The next little bird adventure to be told exhibits me more in the
character of an innocent and exceedingly credulous baby of three than
of a field naturalist of six with a considerable experience of wild
birds.

One spring day an immense number of doves appeared and settled in the
plantation. It was a species common in the country and bred in our
trees, and in fact in every grove or orchard in the land--a pretty
dove-coloured bird with a pretty sorrowful song, about a third less in
size than the domestic pigeon, and belongs to the American genus
_Zenaida._ This dove was a resident with us all the year round, but
occasionally in spring and autumn they were to be seen travelling
in immense flocks, and these were evidently strangers in the land and
came from some sub-tropical country in the north where they had no
fear of the human form. At all events, on going out into the
plantation I found them all about on the ground, diligently searching
for seeds, and so tame and heedless of my presence that I actually
attempted to capture them with my hands. But they wouldn't be caught:
the bird when I stooped and put out my hands slipped away, and flying
a yard or two would settle down in front of me and go on looking for
and picking up invisible seeds.

My attempts failing I rushed back to the house, wildly excited, to
look for an old gentleman who lived with us and took an interest in me
and my passion for birds, and finding him I told him the whole place
was swarming with doves and they were perfectly tame but wouldn't let
me catch them--could he tell me how to catch them? He laughed and said
I must be a little fool not to know how to catch a bird. The only way
was to put salt on their tails. There would be no difficulty in doing
that, I thought, and how delighted I was to know that birds could be
caught so easily! Off I ran to the salt-barrel and filled my pockets
and hands with coarse salt used to make brine in which to dip the
hides; for I wanted to catch a great many doves--armfuls of doves.

In a few minutes I was out again in the plantation, with doves in
hundreds moving over the ground all about me and taking no notice of
me. It was a joyful and exciting moment when I started operations, but
I soon found that when I tossed a handful of salt at the bird's tail
it never fell on its tail--it fell on the ground two or three or four
inches short of the tail. If, I thought, the bird would only keep
still a moment longer! But then it wouldn't, and I think I spent quite
two hours in these vain attempts to make the salt fall on the right
place. At last I went back to my mentor to confess that I had failed
and to ask for fresh instructions, but all he would say was that I was
on the right track, that the plan I had adopted was the proper one,
and all that was wanted was a little more practice to enable me to
drop the salt on the right spot. Thus encouraged I filled my pockets
again and started afresh, and then finding that by following the
proper plan I made no progress I adopted a new one, which was to take
a handful of salt and hurl it at the bird's tail. Still I couldn't
touch the tail; my violent action only frightened the bird and caused
it to fly away, a dozen yards or so, before dropping down again to
resume its seed-searching business.

By-and-by I was told by somebody that birds could not be caught by
putting salt on their tails; that I was being made a fool of, and this
was a great shock to me, since I had been taught to believe that it
was wicked to tell a lie. Now for the first time I discovered that
there were lies and lies, or untruths that were not lies, which one
could tell innocently although they were invented and deliberately
told to deceive. This angered me at first, and I wanted to know how I
was to distinguish between real lies and lies that were not lies, and
the only answer I got was that I could distinguish them by not being
a fool!

In the next adventure to be told we pass from the love (or tameness)
of the turtle to the rage of the vulture. It may be remarked in
passing that the vernacular name of the dove I have described is
_Torcasa,_ which I take it is a corruption of Tortola, the name first
given to it by the early colonists on account of its slight
resemblance to the turtle-dove of Europe.

Then, as to the vulture, it was not a true vulture nor a strictly true
eagle, but a carrion-hawk, a bird the size of a small eagle, blackish
brown in colour with a white neck and breast suffused with brown and
spotted with black; also it had a very big eagle-shaped beak, and
claws not so strong as an eagle's nor so weak as a vulture's. In its
habits it was both eagle and vulture, as it fed on dead flesh, and was
also a hunter and killer of animals and birds, especially of the
weakly and young. A somewhat destructive creature to poultry and young
sucking lambs and pigs. Its feeding habits were, in fact, very like
those of the raven, and its voice, too, was raven-like, or rather like
that of the carrion-crow at his loudest and harshest. Considering the
character of this big rapacious bird, the _Polyborus tharus_ of
naturalists and the _carancho_ of the natives, it may seem strange
that a pair were allowed to nest and live for years in our plantation,
but in those days people were singularly tolerant not only of
injurious birds and beasts but even of beings of their own species
of predaceous habits.

On the outskirts of our old peach orchard, described in a former
chapter, there was a solitary tree of a somewhat singular shape,
standing about forty yards from the others on the edge of a piece of
waste weedy land. It was a big old tree like the others, and had a
smooth round trunk standing about fourteen feet high and throwing out
branches all round, so that its upper part had the shape of an open
inverted umbrella. And in the convenient hollow formed by the circle
of branches the _caranchos_ had built their huge nest, composed of
sticks, lumps of turf, dry bones of sheep and other animals, pieces
of rope and raw hide, and any other object they could carry. The nest
was their home; they roosted in it by night and visited it at odd
times during the day, usually bringing a bleached bone or thistle-
stalk or some such object to add to the pile.

Our birds never attacked the fowls, and were not offensive or
obtrusive, but kept to their own end of the plantation furthest away
from the buildings. They only came when an animal was killed for meat,
and would then hang about, keeping a sharp eye on the proceedings and
watching their chance. This would come when the carcass was dressed
and lights and other portions thrown to the dogs; then the _carancho_
would swoop down like a kite, and snatching up the meat with his beak
would rise to a height of twenty or thirty yards in the air, and
dropping his prize would deftly catch it again in his claws and soar
away to feed on it at leisure. I was never tired of admiring this feat
of the _carancho_, which is, I believe, unique in birds of prey.

The big nest in the old inverted-umbrella-shaped peach tree had a
great attraction for me; I used often to visit it and wonder if I
would ever have the power of getting up to it. Oh, what a delight it
would be to get up there, above the nest, and look down into the great
basin-like hollow lined with sheep's wool and see the eggs, bigger
than turkey's eggs, all marbled with deep red, or creamy white
splashed with blood-red! For I had seen _carancho_ eggs brought in by
a gaucho, and I was ambitious to take a clutch from a nest with my own
hands. It was true I had been told by my mother that if I wanted wild
birds' eggs I was never to take more than one from a nest, unless it
was of some injurious species. And injurious the _carancho_ certainly
was, in spite of his good behaviour when at home. On one of my early
rides on my pony I had seen a pair of them, and I think they were our
own birds, furiously attacking a weak and sickly ewe; she had refused
to lie down to be killed, and they were on her neck, beating and
tearing at her face and trying to pull her down. Also I had seen a
litter of little pigs a sow had brought forth on the plain attacked by
six or seven _caranchos_, and found on approaching the spot that they
had killed half of them (about six, I think), and were devouring them
at some distance from the old pig and the survivors of the litter. But
how could I climb the tree and get over the rim of the huge nest? And
I was afraid of the birds, they looked so unspeakably savage and
formidable whenever I went near them. But my desire to get the eggs
was over-mastering, and when it was spring and I had reason to think
that eggs were being laid, I went oftener than ever to watch and wait
for an opportunity. And one evening just after sunset I could not see
the birds anywhere about and thought my chance had now come. I managed
to swarm up the smooth trunk to the branches, and then with wildly
beating heart began the task of trying to get through the close
branches and to work my way over the huge rim of the nest. Just then I
heard the harsh grating cry of the bird, and peering through the
leaves in the direction it came from I caught sight of the two birds
flying furiously towards me, screaming again as they came nearer. Then
terror seized me, and down I went through the branches, and catching
hold of the lowest one managed to swing myself clear and dropped to
the ground. It was a good long drop, but I fell on a soft turf, and
springing to my feet fled to the shelter of the orchard and then on
towards the house, without ever looking back to see if they were
following.

That was my only attempt to raid the nest, and from that time the
birds continued in peaceful possession of it, until it came into some
person's mind that this huge nest was detrimental to the tree, and was
the cause of its producing so little fruit compared with any other
tree, and the nest was accordingly pulled down, and the birds forsook
the place.

In the description in a former chapter of our old peach trees in their
blossoming time I mentioned the paroquets which occasionally visited
us but had their breeding-place some distance away. This bird was one
of the two common parrots of the district, the other larger species
being the Patagonian parrot, _Conarus patagonus_, the _Loro
barranquero_ or Cliff Parrot of the natives. In my early years this
bird was common on the treeless pampas extending for hundreds of miles
south of Buenos Ayres as well as in Patagonia, and bred in holes it
excavated in cliffs and steep banks at the side of lakes and rivers.
These breeding-sites were far south of my home, and I did not visit
them until my boyhood's days were over.

In winter these birds had a partial migration to the north: at that
season we were visited by flocks, and as a child it was a joy to me
when the resounding screams of the travelling parrots, heard in the
silence long before the birds became visible in the sky, announced
their approach. Then, when they appeared flying at a moderate height,
how strange and beautiful they looked, with long pointed wings and
long graduated tails, in their sombre green plumage touched with
yellow, blue, and crimson colour! How I longed for a nearer
acquaintance with these winter visitors and hoped they would settle on
our trees! Sometimes they did settle to rest, perhaps to spend half a
day or longer in the plantation; and sometimes, to my great happiness,
a flock would elect to remain with us for whole days and weeks,
feeding on the surrounding plain, coming at intervals to the trees
during the day, and at night to roost. I used to go out on my pony to
follow and watch the flock at feed, and wondered at their partiality
for the bitter-tasting seeds of the wild pumpkin. This plant, which
was abundant with us, produced an egg-shaped fruit about half the size
of an ostrich's egg, with a hard shell-like rind, but the birds with
their sharp iron-hard beaks would quickly break up the dry shell and
feast on the pips, scattering the seed-shells about till the ground
was whitened with them. When I approached the feeding flock on my pony
the birds would rise up and, flying to and at me, hover in a compact
crowd just above my head, almost deafening me with their angry
screams.

The smaller bird, the paroquet, which was about the size of a turtle-
dove, had a uniform rich green colour above and ashy-grey beneath,
and, like most parrots, it nested in trees. It is one of the most
social birds I know; it lives all the year round in communities and
builds huge nests of sticks near together as in a rookery, each nest
having accommodation for two or three to half-a-dozen pairs. Each pair
has an entrance and nest cavity of its own in the big structure.

The only breeding-place in our neighbourhood was in a grove or remains
of an ancient ruined plantation at an estancia house, about nine miles
from us, owned by an Englishman named Ramsdale. Here there was a
colony of about a couple of hundred birds, and the dozen or more trees
they had built on were laden with their great nests, each one
containing as much material as would have filled a cart.

Mr. Ramsdale was not our nearest English neighbour--the one to be
described in another chapter; nor was he a man we cared much about,
and his meagre establishment was not attractive, as his old slatternly
native housekeeper and the other servants were allowed to do just what
they liked. But he was English and a neighbour, and my parents made it
a point of paying him an occasional visit, and I always managed to go
with them--certainly not to see Mr. Ramsdale, who had nothing to say
to a shy little boy and whose hard red face looked the face of a hard
drinker. _My_ visits were to the paroquets exclusively. Oh, why,
thought I many and many a time, did not these dear green people come
over to us and have their happy village in our trees! Yet when I
visited them they didn't like it; no sooner would I run out to the
grove where the nests were than the place would be in an uproar. Out
and up they would rush, to unite in a flock and hover shrieking over
my head, and the commotion would last until I left them.

On our return late one afternoon in early spring from one of our rare
visits to Mr. Ramsdale, we witnessed a strange thing. The plain at
that place was covered with a dense growth of cardoon-thistle or wild
artichoke, and leaving the estancia house in our trap, we followed the
cattle tracks as there was no road on that side. About half-way home
we saw a troop of seven or eight deer in an open green space among the
big grey thistle-bushes, but instead of uttering their whistling
alarm-cry and making off at our approach they remained at the same
spot, although we passed within forty yards of them. The troop was
composed of two bucks engaged in a furious fight, and five or six does
walking round and round the two fighters. The bucks kept their heads
so low down that their noses were almost touching the ground, while
with their horns locked together they pushed violently, and from time
to time one would succeed in forcing the other ten or twenty feet
back. Then a pause, then another violent push, then with horns still
together they would move sideways, round and round, and so on until we
left them behind and lost sight of them.

This spectacle greatly excited us at the time and was vividly recalled
several months afterwards when one of our gaucho neighbours told us of
a curious thing he had just seen. He had been out on that cardoon-
covered spot where we had seen the fighting deer, and at that very
spot in the little green space he had come upon the skeletons of two
deer with their horns interlocked.

Tragedies of this kind in the wild animal world have often been
recorded, but they are exceedingly rare on the pampas, as the smooth
few-pronged antlers of the native deer, _corvus campestris_, are not
so liable to get hopelessly locked as in many other species.

Deer were common in our district in those days, and were partial to
land overgrown with cardoon thistle, which in the absence of trees and
thickets afforded them some sort of cover. I seldom rode to that side
without getting a sight of a group of deer, often looking exceedingly
conspicuous in their bright fawn colour as they stood gazing at the
intruder amidst the wide waste of grey cardoon bushes.

These rough plains were also the haunt of the rhea, our ostrich, and
it was here that I first had a close sight of this greatest and most
unbird-like bird of our continent. I was eight years old then, when
one afternoon in late summer I was just setting off for a ride on my
pony, when I was told to go out on the east side till I came to the
cardoon-covered land about a mile beyond the shepherd's ranch. The
shepherd was wanted in the plantation and could not go to the flock
just yet, and I was told to look for the flock and turn it towards
home.

I found the flock just where I had been told to look for it, the sheep
very widely scattered, and some groups of a dozen or two to a hundred
were just visible at a distance among the rough bushes. Just where
these furthest sheep were grazing there was a scattered troop of
seventy or eighty horses grazing too, and when I rode to that spot I
all at once found myself among a lot of rheas, feeding too among the
sheep and horses. Their grey plumage being so much like the cardoon
bushes in colour had prevented me from seeing them before I was right
among them.

The strange thing was that they paid not the slightest attention to
me, and pulling up my pony I sat staring in astonishment at them,
particularly at one, a very big one and nearest to me, engaged in
leisurely pecking at the clover plants growing among the big prickly
thistle leaves, and as it seemed carefully selecting the best sprays.

What a great noble-looking bird it was and how beautiful in its loose
grey-and-white plumage, hanging like a picturesquely-worn mantle about
its body! Why were they so tame? I wondered. The sight of a mounted
gaucho, even at a great distance, will invariably set them off at
their topmost speed; yet here I was within a dozen yards of one of
them, with several others about me, all occupied in examining the
herbage and selecting the nicest-looking leaves to pluck, just as if I
was not there at all! I suppose it was because I was only a small boy
on a small horse and was not associated in the ostrich brain with the
wild-looking gaucho on his big animal charging upon him with a deadly
purpose. Presently I went straight at the one near me, and he then
raised his head and neck and moved carelessly away to a distance of a
few yards, then began cropping the clover once more. I rode at him
again, putting my pony to a trot, and when within two yards of him he
all at once swung his body round in a quaint way towards me, and
breaking into a sort of dancing trot brushed past me.

Pulling up again and looking back I found he was ten or twelve yards
behind me, once more quietly engaged in cropping clover leaves!

Again and again this bird, and one of the others I rode at, practised
the same pretty trick, first appearing perfectly unconcerned at my
presence and then, when I made a charge at them, with just one little
careless movement placing themselves a dozen yards behind me.

But this same trick of the rhea is wonderful to see when the hunted
bird is spent with running and is finally overtaken by one of the
hunters who has perhaps lost the bolas with which he captures his
quarry, and who endeavours to place himself side by side with it so as
to reach it with his knife. It seems an easy thing to do: the bird is
plainly exhausted, panting, his wings hanging, as he lopes on, yet no
sooner is the man within striking distance than the sudden motion
comes into play, and the bird as by a miracle is now behind instead of
at the side of the horse. And before the horse going at top speed can
be reined in and turned round, the rhea has had time to recover his
wind and get a hundred yards away or more. It is on account of this
tricky instinct of the rhea that the gauchos say, "El avestruz es el
mas _gaucho_ de los animales," which means that the ostrich, in its
resourcefulness and the tricks it practises to save itself when
hard pressed, is as clever as the gaucho knows himself to be.




CHAPTER VII

MY FIRST VISIT TO BUENOS AYRES

Happiest time--First visit to the Capital--Old and New Buenos Ayres--
Vivid impressions--Solitary walk--How I learnt to go alone--Lost--The
house we stayed at and the sea-like river--Rough and narrow streets--
Rows of posts--Carts and noise--A great church festival--Young men in
black and scarlet--River scenes--Washerwomen and their language--Their
word-fights with young fashionables--Night watchmen--A young
gentleman's pastime--A fishing dog--A fine gentleman seen stoning
little birds--A glimpse of Don Eusebio, the Dictator's fool.



The happiest time of my boyhood was at that early period, a little
past the age of six, when I had my own pony to ride on, and was
allowed to stay on his back just as long and go as far from home as I
liked. I was like the young bird when on first quitting the nest it
suddenly becomes conscious of its power to fly. My early flying days
were, however, soon interrupted, when my mother took me on my first
visit to Buenos Ayres; that is to say, the first I remember, as I must
have been taken there once before as an infant in arms, since we lived
too far from town for any missionary-clergyman to travel all that
distance just to baptize a little baby. Buenos Ayres is now the
wealthiest, most populous, Europeanized city in South America: what it
was like at that time these glimpses into a far past will serve to
show. Coming as a small boy of an exceptionally impressionable mind,
from that green plain where people lived the simple pastoral life,
everything I saw in the city impressed me deeply, and the sights which
impressed me the most are as vivid in my mind to-day as they ever
were. I was a solitary little boy in my rambles about the streets, for
though I had a younger brother who was my only playmate, he was not
yet five, and too small to keep me company in my walks. Nor did I mind
having no one with me. Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired
the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way, and it
was only after years, when my age was about twelve, that my mother
told me how anxious this singularity in me used to make her. She would
miss me when looking out to see what the children were doing, and I
would be called and searched for, to be found hidden away somewhere in
the plantation. Then she began to keep an eye on me, and when I was
observed stealing off she would secretly follow and watch me, standing
motionless among the tall weeds or under the trees by the half-hour,
staring at vacancy. This distressed her very much; then to her great
relief and joy she discovered that I was there with a motive which she
could understand and appreciate: that I was watching some living
thing, an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird--a pair of little scarlet
flycatchers building a nest of lichen on a peach tree, or some such
beautiful thing. And as she loved all living things herself she was
quite satisfied that I was not going queer in my head, for that was
what she had been fearing.

The strangeness of the streets was a little too much for me at the
start, and I remember that on first venturing out by myself a little
distance from home I got lost. In despair of ever finding my way back
I began to cry, hiding my face against a post at a street corner, and
was there soon surrounded by quite a number of passers-by; then a
policeman came up, with brass buttons on his blue coat and a sword at
his side, and taking me by the arm he asked me in a commanding voice
where I lived--the name of the street and the number of the house. I
couldn't tell him; then I began to get frightened on account of his
sword and big black moustache and loud rasping voice, and suddenly ran
away, and after running for about six or eight minutes found myself
back at home, to my surprise and joy.

The house where we stayed with English friends was near the front, or
what was then the front, that part of the city which faced the Plata
river, a river which was like the sea, with no visible shore beyond;
and like the sea it was tidal, and differed only in its colour, which
was a muddy red instead of blue or green. The house was roomy, and
like most of the houses at that date had a large courtyard paved with
red tiles and planted with small lemon trees and flowering shrubs of
various kinds. The streets were straight and narrow, paved with round
boulder stones the size of a football, the pavements with brick or
flagstones, and so narrow they would hardly admit of more than two
persons walking abreast. Along the pavements on each side of the
street were rows of posts placed at a distance of ten yards apart.
These strange-looking rows of posts, which foreigners laughed to see,
were no doubt the remains of yet ruder times, when ropes of hide were
stretched along the side of the pavements to protect the foot-
passengers from runaway horses, wild cattle driven by wild men from
the plains, and other dangers of the narrow streets. As they were then
paved the streets must have been the noisiest in the world, on account
of the immense numbers of big springless carts in them. Imagine the
thunderous racket made by a long procession of these carts, when they
were returning empty, and the drivers, as was often the case, urged
their horses to a gallop, and they bumped and thundered over the big
round stones!

Just opposite the house we stayed at there was a large church, one of
the largest of the numerous churches of the city, and one of my most
vivid memories relates to a great annual festival at the church--that
of the patron saint's day. It had been open to worshippers all day,
but the chief service was held about three o'clock in the afternoon;
at all events it was at that hour when a great attendance of
fashionable people took place. I watched them as they came in couples,
families and small groups, in every case the ladies, beautifully
dressed, attended by their cavaliers. At the door of the church the
gentleman would make his bow and withdraw to the street before the
building, where a sort of outdoor gathering was formed of all those
who had come as escorts to the ladies, and where they would remain
until the service was over. The crowd in the street grew and grew
until there were about four or five hundred gentlemen, mostly young,
in the gathering, all standing in small groups, conversing in an
animated way, so that the street was filled with the loud humming
sound of their blended voices. These men were all natives, all of the
good or upper class of the native society, and all dressed exactly
alike in the fashion of that time. It was their dress and the uniform
appearance of so large a number of persons, most of them with young,
handsome, animated faces, that fascinated me and kept me on the spot
gazing at them until the big bells began to thunder at the conclusion
of the service and the immense concourse of gaily-dressed ladies
swarmed out, and immediately the meeting broke up, the gentlemen
hurrying back to meet them.

They all wore silk hats and the glossiest black broadcloth, not even a
pair of trousers of any other shade was seen; and all wore the scarlet
silk or fine cloth waistcoat which, at that period, was considered the
right thing for every citizen of the republic to wear; also, in lieu
of buttonhole, a scarlet ribbon pinned to the lapel of the coat. It
was a pretty sight, and the concourse reminded me of a flock of
military starlings, a black or dark-plumaged bird with a scarlet
breast, one of my feathered favourites.

My rambles were almost always on the front, since I could walk there a
mile or two from home, north or south, without getting lost, always
with the vast expanse of water on one hand, with many big ships
looking dim in the distance, and numerous lighters or belanders coming
from them with cargoes of merchandise which they unloaded into carts,
these going out a quarter of a mile in the shallow water to meet them.
Then there were the water-carts going and coming in scores and
hundreds, for at that period there was no water supply to the houses,
and every house-holder had to buy muddy water by the bucket at his own
door from the watermen.

One of the most attractive spots to me was the congregating place of
the _lavanderas_, south of my street. Here on the broad beach under
the cliff one saw a whiteness like a white cloud, covering the ground
for a space of about a third of a mile; and the cloud, as one drew
near, resolved itself into innumerable garments, sheets and quilts,
and other linen pieces, fluttering from long lines, and covering the
low rocks washed clean by the tide and the stretches of green turf
between. It was the spot where the washerwomen were allowed to wash
all the dirty linen of Buenos Ayres in public. All over the ground the
women, mostly negresses, were seen on their knees, beside the pools
among the rocks, furiously scrubbing and pounding away at their work,
and like all negresses they were exceedingly vociferous, and their
loud gabble, mingled with yells and shrieks of laughter, reminded me
of the hubbub made by a great concourse of gulls, ibises, godwits,
geese, and other noisy water-fowl on some marshy lake. It was a
wonderfully animated scene, and drew me to it again and again: I
found, however, that it was necessary to go warily among these women,
as they looked with suspicion at idling boys, and sometimes, when I
picked my way among the spread garments, I was sharply ordered off.
Then, too, they often quarrelled over their right to certain places
and spaces among themselves; then very suddenly their hilarious gabble
would change to wild cries of anger and torrents of abuse. By and by I
discovered that their greatest rages and worst language were when
certain young gentlemen of the upper classes visited the spot to amuse
themselves by baiting the _lavanderas_. The young gentleman would
saunter about in an absent-minded manner and presently walk right on
to a beautifully embroidered and belaced nightdress or other dainty
garment spread out to dry on the sward or rock, and, standing on it,
calmly proceed to take out and light a cigarette. Instantly the black
virago would be on her feet confronting him and pouring out a torrent
of her foulest expressions and deadliest curses. He, in a pretended
rage, would reply in even worse language. That would put her on her
mettle; for now all her friends and foes scattered about the ground
would suspend their work to listen with all their ears; and the
contest of words growing louder and fiercer would last until the
combatants were both exhausted and unable to invent any more new and
horrible expressions of opprobrium to hurl at each other. Then the
insulted young gentleman would kick the garment away in a fury and
hurling the unfinished cigarette in his adversary's face would walk
off with his nose in the air.

I laugh to recall these unseemly word-battles on the beach, but they
were shocking to me when I first heard them as a small, innocent-
minded boy, and it only made the case worse when I was assured that
the young gentleman was only acting a part, that the extreme anger he
exhibited, which might have served as an excuse for using such
language, was all pretence.

Another favourite pastime of these same idle, rich young gentlemen
offended me as much as the one I have related. The night-watchmen,
called _Serenos,_ of that time interested me in an extraordinary way.
When night came it appeared that the fierce policemen, with their
swords and brass buttons, were no longer needed to safeguard the
people, and their place in the streets was taken by a quaint, frowsy-
looking body of men, mostly old, some almost decrepit, wearing big
cloaks and carrying staffs and heavy iron lanterns with a tallow
candle alight inside. But what a pleasure it was to lie awake at night
and listen to their voices calling the hours! The calls began at the
stroke of eleven, and then from beneath the window would come the
wonderful long drawling call of _Las on--ce han da--do y se--re--no,_
which means eleven of the clock and all serene, but if clouded the
concluding word would be _nu--bla--do,_ and so on, according to the
weather. From all the streets, from all over the town, the long-drawn
calls would float to my listening ears, with infinite variety in the
voices--the high and shrill, the falsetto, the harsh, raucous note
like the caw of the carrion crow, the solemn, booming bass, and then
some fine, rich, pure voice that soared heavenwards above all the
others and was like the pealing notes of an organ.

I loved the poor night-watchmen and their cries, and it grieved my
little soft heart to hear that it was considered fine sport by the
rich young gentlemen to sally forth at night and do battle with them,
and to deprive them of their staffs and lanterns, which they took home
and kept as trophies.

Another human phenomenon which annoyed and shocked my tender mind,
like that of the contests on the beach between young gentlemen and
washerwomen, was the multitude of beggars which infested the town.
These were not like our dignified beggar on horseback, with his red
poncho, spurs and tall straw hat, who rode to your gate, and having
received his tribute, blessed you and rode away to the next estancia.
These city beggars on the pavement were the most brutal, even
fiendish, looking men I had ever seen. Most of them were old soldiers,
who, having served their ten, fifteen, or twenty years, according to
the nature of the crime for which they had been condemned to the army,
had been discharged or thrown out to live like carrion-hawks on what
they could pick up. Twenty times a day at least you would hear the
iron gate opening from the courtyard into the street swung open,
followed by the call or shout of the beggar demanding charity in the
name of God. Outside you could not walk far without being confronted
by one of these men, who would boldly square himself in front of you
on the narrow pavement and beg for alms. If you had no change and
said, _"Perdon, por Dios,"_ he would scowl and let you pass; but if
you looked annoyed or disgusted, or ordered him out of the way, or
pushed by without a word, he would glare at you with a concentrated
rage which seemed to say, "Oh, to have you down at my mercy, bound
hand and foot, a sharp knife in my hand!" And this would be followed
by a blast of the most horrible language.

One day I witnessed a very strange thing, the action of a dog, by the
waterside. It was evening and the beach was forsaken; cartmen,
fishermen, boatmen all gone, and I was the only idler left on the
rocks; but the tide was coming in, rolling quite big waves on to the
rocks, and the novel sight of the waves, the freshness, the joy of it,
kept me at that spot, standing on one of the outermost rocks not yet
washed over by the water. By and by a gentleman, followed by a big
dog, came down on to the beach and stood at a distance of forty or
fifty yards from me, while the dog bounded forward over the flat,
slippery rocks and through pools of water until he came to my side,
and sitting on the edge of the rock began gazing intently down at the
water. He was a big, shaggy, round-headed animal, with a greyish coat
with some patches of light reddish colour on it; what his breed was I
cannot say, but he looked somewhat like a sheep-dog or an otter-hound.
Suddenly he plunged in, quite disappearing from sight, but quickly
reappeared with a big shad of about three and a half or four pounds'
weight in his jaws. Climbing on to the rock he dropped the fish, which
he did not appear to have injured much, as it began floundering about
in an exceedingly lively manner. I was astonished and looked back at
the dog's master; but there he stood in the same place, smoking and
paying no attention to what his animal was doing. Again the dog
plunged in and brought out a second big fish and dropped it on the
flat rock, and again and again he dived, until there were five big
shads all floundering about on the wet rock and likely soon to be
washed back into the water. The shad is a common fish in the Plata and
the best to eat of all its fishes, resembling the salmon in its rich
flavour, and is eagerly watched for when it comes up from the sea by
the Buenos Ayres fishermen, just as our fishermen watch for mackerel
on our coasts. But on this evening the beach was deserted by every
one, watchers included, and the fish came and swarmed along the rocks,
and there was no one to catch them--not even some poor hungry idler to
pounce upon and carry off the five fishes the dog had captured. One by
one I saw them washed back into the water, and presently the dog,
hearing his master whistling to him, bounded away.

For many years after this incident I failed to find any one who had
even seen or heard of a dog catching fish. Eventually, in reading I
met with an account of fishing-dogs in Newfoundland and other
countries.

One other strange adventure met with on the front remains to be told.
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning and I was on the parade,
walking north, pausing from time to time to look over the sea-wall to
watch the flocks of small birds that came to feed on the beach below.
Presently my attention was drawn to a young man walking on before me,
pausing and peering too from time to time over the wall, and when he
did so throwing something at the small birds. I ran on and overtook
him, and was rather taken aback at his wonderfully fine appearance. He
was like one of the gentlemen of the gathering before the church,
described a few pages back, and wore a silk hat and fashionable black
coat and trousers and scarlet silk waistcoat; he was also a remarkably
handsome young gentleman, with a golden-brown curly beard and
moustache and dark liquid eyes that studied my face with a half-amused
curiosity when I looked up at him. In one hand he carried a
washleather bag by its handle, and holding a pebble in his right hand
he watched the birds, the small parties of crested song sparrows,
yellow house sparrows, siskins, field finches, and other kinds, and
from time to time he would hurl a pebble at the bird he had singled
out forty yards down below us on the rocks. I did not see him actually
hit a bird, but his precision was amazing, for almost invariably the
missile, thrown from such a distance at so minute an object, appeared
to graze the feathers and to miss killing by but a fraction of an
inch.

I followed him for some distance, my wonder and curiosity growing
every minute to see such a superior-looking person engaged in such a
pastime. For it is a fact that the natives do not persecute small
birds. On the contrary, they despise the aliens in the land who shoot
and trap them. Besides, if he wanted small birds for any purpose, why
did he try to get them by throwing pebbles at them? As he did not
order me off, but looked in a kindly way at me every little while,
with a slight smile on his face, I at length ventured to tell him that
he would never get a bird that way--that it would be impossible at
that distance to hit one with a small pebble. "Oh, no, not
impossible," he returned, smiling and walking on, still with an eye
on the rocks. "Well, you haven't hit one yet," I was bold enough to
say, and at that he stopped, and putting his finger and thumb in his
waistcoat pocket he pulled out a dead male siskin and put it in my
hands.

This was the bird called "goldfinch" by the English resident in La
Plata, and to the Spanish it is also goldfinch; it is, however, a
siskin, _Chrysomitris magellanica,_ and has a velvet-black head, the
rest of its plumage being black, green, and shining yellow. It was
one of my best-loved birds, but I had never had one in my hand, dead
or alive, before, and now its wonderful unimagined loveliness, its
graceful form, and the exquisitely pure flower-like yellow hue
affected me with a delight so keen that I could hardly keep from
tears.

After gloating a few moments over it, touching it with my finger-tips
and opening the little black and gold wings, I looked up pleadingly
and begged him to let me keep it. He smiled and shook his head: he
would not waste his breath talking; all his energy was to be spent in
hurling pebbles at other lovely little birds.

"Oh, senor, will you not give it to me?" I pleaded still; and then,
with sudden hope, "Are you going to sell it?"

He laughed, and taking it from my hand put it back in his waistcoat
pocket; then, with a pleasant smile and a nod to say that the
interview was now over, he went on his way.

Standing on the spot where he left me, and still bitterly regretting
that I had failed to get the bird, I watched him until he disappeared
from sight in the distance, walking towards the suburb of Palermo; and
a mystery he remains to this day, the one and only Argentine
gentleman, a citizen of the Athens of South America, amusing himself
by killing little birds with pebbles. But I do not know that it was an
amusement. He had perhaps in some wild moment made a vow to kill so
many siskins in that way, or a bet to prove his skill in throwing a
pebble; or he might have been practising a cure for some mysterious
deadly malady, prescribed by some wandering physician from Bagdad or
Ispaham; or, more probable still, some heartless, soulless woman he
was in love with had imposed this fantastical task on him.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing I saw during that first eventful
visit to the capital was the famed Don Eusebio, the court jester or
fool of the President or Dictator Rosas, the "Nero of South America,"
who lived in his palace at Palermo, just outside the city. I had been
sent with my sisters and little brother to spend the day at the house
of an Anglo-Argentine family in another part of the town, and we were
in the large courtyard playing with the children of the house when
some one opened a window above us and called out, "Don Eusebio!" That
conveyed nothing to me, but the little boys of the house knew what it
meant; it meant that if we went quickly out to the street we might
catch a glimpse of the great man in all his glory. At all events, they
jumped up, flinging their toys away, and rushed to the street door,
and we after them. Coming out we found quite a crowd of lookers-on,
and then down the street, in his general's dress--for it was one of
the Dictator's little jokes to make his fool a general--all scarlet,
with a big scarlet three-cornered hat surmounted by an immense
aigrette of scarlet plumes, came Don Eusebio. He marched along with
tremendous dignity, his sword at his side, and twelve soldiers, also
in scarlet, his bodyguard, walking six on each side of him with drawn
swords in their hands.

We gazed with joyful excitement at this splendid spectacle, and it
made it all the more thrilling when one of the boys whispered in my
ear that if any person in the crowd laughed or made any insulting or
rude remark, he would be instantly cut to pieces by the guard. And
they looked truculent enough for anything.

The great Rosas himself I did not see, but it was something to have
had this momentary sight of General Eusebio, his fool, on the eve of
his fall after a reign of over twenty years, during which he proved
himself one of the bloodiest as well as the most original-minded of
the Caudillos and Dictators, and altogether, perhaps, the greatest of
those who have climbed into power in this continent of republics and
revolutions.




CHAPTER VIII

THE TYRANT'S FALL AND WHAT FOLLOWED

The portraits in our drawing-room--The Dictator Rosas who was like an
Englishman--The strange face of his wife, Encarnacion--The traitor
Urquiza--The Minister of War, his peacocks, and his son--Home again
from the city--The War deprives us of our playmate--Natalia, our
shepherd's wife--Her son, Medardo--The Alcalde our grand old man--
Battle of Monte Caseros--The defeated army--Demands for fresh horses--
In peril--My father's shining defects--His pleasure in a thunder
storm--A childlike trust in his fellow-men--Soldiers turn upon their
officer--A refugee given up and murdered--Our Alcalde again--On
cutting throats--Ferocity and cynicism--Native blood-lust and its
effect on a boy's mind--Feeling about Rosas--A bird poem or tale--Vain
search for lost poem and story of its authorship--The Dictator's
daughter--Time, the old god.



At the end of the last chapter, when describing my one sight of the
famous jester, Don Eusebio, in his glory, attended by a body-guard
with drawn swords who were ready to cut down any one of the spectators
who failed to remove his hat or laughed at the show, I said it was on
the eve of the fall of the President of the Republic, or Dictator,
"the Tyrant," as he was called by his adversaries when they didn't
call him the "Nero of South America" or the "Tiger of Palermo"--this
being the name of a park on the north side of Buenos Ayres where Rosas
lived in a white stuccoed house called his palace.

At that time the portrait, in colours, of the great man occupied the
post of honour above the mantelpiece in our _sala_, or drawing-room--
the picture of a man with fine clear-cut regular features, light
reddish-brown hair and side-whiskers, and blue eyes; he was sometimes
called "Englishman" on account of his regular features and blonde
complexion. That picture of a stern handsome face, with flags and
cannon and olive-branch--the arms of the republic--in its heavy gold
frame, was one of the principal ornaments of the room, and my father
was proud of it, since he was, for reasons to be stated by and by, a
great admirer of Rosas, an out-and-out Rosista, as the loyal ones were
called. This portrait was flanked by two others; one of Dona
Encarnacion, the wife, long dead, of Rosas; a handsome, proud-looking
young woman with a vast amount of black hair piled up on her head in a
fantastic fashion, surmounted by a large tortoiseshell comb. I
remember that as small children we used to look with a queer, almost
uncanny sort of feeling at this face under its pile of black hair,
because it was handsome but not sweet nor gentle, and because she was
dead and had died long ago; yet it was like the picture of one alive
when we looked at it, and those black unloving eyes gazed straight
back into ours. Why did those eyes, unless they moved, which they
didn't, always look back into ours no matter in what part of the room
we stood?--a perpetual puzzle to our childish uninformed brains.

On the other side was the repellent, truculent countenance of the
Captain-General Urquiza, who was the Dictator's right-hand man, a
ferocious cut-throat if ever there was one, who had upheld his
authority for many years in the rebellious upper provinces, but who
had just now raised the standard of revolt against him and in a little
while, with the aid of a Brazilian army, would succeed in overthrowing
him.

The central portrait inspired us with a kind of awe and reverential
feeling, since even as small children we were made to know that he was
the greatest man in the republic, that he had unlimited power over all
men's lives and fortunes and was terrible in his anger against evil-
doers, especially those who rebelled against his authority.

Two more portraits of the famous men of the republic of that date
adorned the same wall. Next to Urquiza was General Oribe, commander of
the army sent by Rosas against Montevideo, which maintained the siege
of that city for the space of ten years. On the other side, next to
Dona Encarnacion, was the portrait of the Minister of War, a face
which had no attraction for us children, as it was not coloured like
that of the Dictator, nor had any romance or mystery in it like that
of his dead wife; yet it served to bring all these pictured people
into our actual world--to make us realize that they were the
counterfeit presentments of real men and women. For it happened that
this same Minister of War was in a way a neighbour of ours, as he
owned an estancia, which he sometimes visited, about three leagues
from us, on that part of the plain to the east of our place which I
have described in a former chapter as being covered with a dense
growth of the bluish-grey wild artichoke, the _cardo de Castilla_, as
it is called in the vernacular. Like most of the estancia houses of
that day it was a long low building of brick with thatched roof,
surrounded by an enclosed _quinta_, or plantation, with rows of
century-old Lombardy poplars conspicuous at a great distance, and many
old acacia, peach, quince, and cherry trees. It was a cattle and
horse-breeding establishment, but the beasts were of less account to
the owner than his peacocks, a fowl for which he had so great a
predilection that he could not have too many of them; he was always
buying more peacocks to send out to the estate, and they multiplied
until the whole place swarmed with them. And he wanted them all for
himself, so that it was forbidden to sell or give even an egg away.
The place was in the charge of a major-domo, a good-natured fellow,
and when he discovered that we liked peacocks' feathers for decorative
purposes in the house, he made it a custom to send us each year at the
moulting-time large bundles, whole armfuls, of feathers.

Another curious thing in the estancia was a large room set apart for
the display of trophies sent from Buenos Ayres by the Minister's
eldest son. I have already given an account of a favourite pastime of
the young gentlemen of the capital--that of giving battle to the
night-watchmen and wresting their staffs and lanterns from them. Our
Minister's heir was a leader in this sport, and from time to time sent
consignments of his trophies to the country place, where the walls of
the room were covered with staffs and festoons of lanterns.

Once or twice as a small boy I had the privilege of meeting this young
gentleman and looked at him with an intense curiosity which has served
to keep his image in my mind till now. His figure was slender and
graceful, his features good, and he had a rather long Spanish face;
his eyes were grey-blue, and his hair and moustache a reddish golden-
brown. It was a handsome face, but with a curiously repelling,
impatient, reckless, almost devilish expression.

I was at home again, back in the plantation among my beloved birds,
glad to escape from the noisy dusty city into the sweet green
silences, with the great green plain glittering with the false water
of the mirage spreading around our shady oasis, and the fact that war,
which for the short period of my own little life and for many long
years before I was born, had not visited our province, thanks to Rosas
the Tyrant, the man of blood and iron, had now come to us did not make
the sunshine less sweet and pleasant to behold. Our elders, it is
true, showed anxious faces, but they were often anxious about matters
which did not affect us children, and therefore didn't matter. But by
and by even we little ones were made to realize that there was a
trouble in the land which touched us too, since it deprived us of the
companionship of the native boy who was our particular friend and
guardian during our early horseback rambles on the plain. This boy,
Medardo, or Dardo, was the fifteen-years-old son--illegitimate of
course--of the native woman our English shepherd had made his wife.
Why he had done so was a perpetual mystery and marvel to every one on
account of her person and temper. The very thought of this poor
Natalia, or Dona Nata as she was called, long dead and turned to dust
in that far pampa, troubles my spirit even now and gives me the
uncomfortable feeling that in putting her portrait on this paper I am
doing a mean thing.

She was an excessively lean creature, careless, and even dirty in her
person, with slippers but no stockings on her feet, an old dirty gown
of a coarse blue cotton stuff and a large coloured cotton handkerchief
or piece of calico wound turban-wise about her head. She was of a
yellowish parchment colour, the skin tight-drawn over the small bony
aquiline features, and it would have seemed like the face of a corpse
or mummy but for the deeply-sunken jet-black eyes burning with a
troubled fire in their sockets. There was a tremor and strangely
pathetic note in her thin high-pitched voice, as of a woman speaking
with effort between half-suppressed sobs, or like the mournful cry of
some wild bird of the marshes. Voice and face were true indications of
her anxious mind. She was in a perpetual state of worry over some
trifling matter, and when a real trouble came, as when our flock "got
mixed" with a neighbour's flock and four or five thousand sheep had to
be parted, sheep by sheep, according to their ear-marks, or when her
husband came home drunk and tumbled off his horse at the door instead
of dismounting in the usual manner, she would be almost out of her
mind and wring her hands and shriek and cry out that such conduct
would not be endured by his long-suffering master, and they would no
longer have a roof over their heads!

Poor anxious-minded Nata, who moved us both to pity and repulsion, it
was impossible not to admire her efforts to keep her stolid
inarticulate husband in the right path and her intense wild animal-
like love of her children--the three dirty-faced English-looking
offspring of her strange marriage, and Dardo, her firstborn, the son
of the wind. He, too, was an interesting person; small or short for
his years, he was thick and had a curiously solid mature appearance,
with a round head, wide open, startlingly bright eyes, and aquiline
features which gave him a resemblance to a sparrow-hawk. He was mature
in mind, too, and had all the horse lore of the seasoned gaucho, and
at the same time he was like a child in his love of fun and play, and
wanted nothing better than to serve us as a perpetual playmate. But he
had his work, which was to look after the flock when the shepherd's
services were required elsewhere; an easy task for him on his horse,
especially in summer when for long hours the sheep would stand
motionless on the plain. Dardo, who was teaching us to swim, would
then invite us to go to the river--to one of two streams within half
an hour's ride from home, where there were good bathing-pools! but
always before starting he would have to go and ask his mother's
consent. Mounting my pony I would follow him to the _puesto_ or
shepherd's ranche, only to be denied permission: "No, you are not to
go to-day: you must not think of such a thing. I forbid you to take
the boys to the river this day!"

Then Dardo, turning his horse's head, would exclaim, "Oh, caram-bam-
bam-ba!" And she, seeing him going, would rush out after us,
shrieking, "Don't caram-bam-bam-ba me! You are not to go to the river
this day--I forbid it! I know if you go to the river this day there
will be a terrible calamity! Listen to me, Dardo, rebel, devil that
you are, you shall not go bathing to-day!" And the cries would
continue until, breaking into a gallop, we would quickly be out of
earshot. Then Dardo would say, "Now we'll go back to the house for the
others and go to the river. You see, she made me kneel before the
crucifix and promise never to take you to bathe without asking her
consent. And that's all I've got to do; I never promised to obey her
commands, so it's all right."

These pleasant adventures with Dardo on the plain were suddenly put a
stop to by the war. One morning a number of persons on foot and on
horseback were seen coming to us over the green plain from the
shepherd's ranche, and as they drew nearer we recognized our old
Alcalde on his horse as the leader of the procession, and behind him
walked Dona Nata, holding her son by the hand; then followed others on
foot, and behind them all rode four old gauchos, the Alcalde's
henchmen, wearing their swords.

What matter of tremendous importance had brought this crowd to our
house? The Alcalde, Don Amaro Avalos, was not only the representative
of the "authorities" in our parts--police officer, petty magistrate of
sorts, and several other things besides--but a grand old man in
himself, and he looms large in memory among the old gaucho patriarchs
in our neighbourhood. He was a big man, about six feet high,
exceedingly dignified in manner, his long hair and beard of a silvery
whiteness; he wore the gaucho costume with a great profusion of silver
ornaments, including ponderous silver spurs weighing about four
pounds, and heavy silver whip-handle. As a rule he rode on a big black
horse which admirably suited his figure and the scarlet colour and
silver of his costume.

On arrival Don Amaro was conducted to the drawing-room, followed by
all the others; and when all were seated, including the four old
gauchos wearing swords, the Alcalde addressed my parents and informed
them of the object of the visit. He had received an imperative order
from his superiors, he said, to take at once and send to headquarters
twelve more young men as recruits for the army from his small section
of the district. Now most of the young men had already been taken, or
had disappeared from the neighbourhood in order to avoid service, and
to make up this last twelve he had even to take boys of the age of
this one, and Medardo would have to go. But this woman would not have
her boy taken, and after spending many words in trying to convince her
that she must submit he had at last, to satisfy her, consented to
accompany her to her master's house to discuss the matter again in her
master and mistress's presence.

It was a long speech, pronounced with great dignity; then, almost
before it finished, the distracted mother jumped up and threw herself
on her knees before my parents, and in her wild tremulous voice began
crying to them, imploring them to have compassion on her and help her
to save her boy from such a dreadful destiny. What would he be, she
cried, a boy of his tender years dragged from his home, from his
mother's care, and thrown among a crowd of old hardened soldiers, and
of evil-minded men--murderers, robbers, and criminals of all
descriptions drawn from all the prisons of the land to serve in the
army!

It was dreadful to see her on her knees wringing her hands, and to
listen to her wild lamentable cries; and again and again while the
matter was being discussed between the old Alcalde and my parents, she
would break out and plead with such passion and despair in her voice
and words, that all the people in the room were affected to tears. She
was like some wild animal trying to save her offspring from the
hunters. Never, exclaimed my mother, when the struggle was over, had
she passed so painful, so terrible, an hour! And the struggle had all
been in vain, and Dardo was taken from us.

One morning, some weeks later, the dull roar from distant big guns
came to our ears, and we were told that a great battle was being
fought, that Rosas himself was at the head of his army--a poor little
force of 25,000 men got together in hot haste to oppose a mixed
Argentine and Brazilian force of about 40,000 men commanded by the
traitor Urquiza. During several hours of that anxious day the dull,
heavy sound of firing continued and was like distant thunder: then in
the evening came the tidings of the overthrow of the defending army,
and of the march of the enemy on Buenos Ayres city! On the following
day, from dawn to dark, we were in the midst of an incessant stream of
the defeated men, flying to the south, in small parties of two or
three to half a dozen men, with some larger bands, all in their
scarlet uniforms and armed with lances and carbines and broadswords,
many of the bands driving large numbers of horses before them.

My father was warned by the neighbours that we were in great danger,
since these men were now lawless and would not hesitate to plunder and
kill in their retreat, and that all riding-horses would certainly be
seized by them. As a precaution he had the horses driven in and
concealed in the plantation, and that was all he would do. "Oh no," he
said, with a laugh, "they won't hurt us," and so we were all out and
about all day with the front gate and all doors and windows standing
open. From time to time a band on tired horses rode to the gate and,
without dismounting, shouted a demand for fresh horses. In every case
he went out and talked to them, always with a smiling, pleasant face,
and after assuring them that he had no horses for them they slowly and
reluctantly took their departure.

About three o'clock in the afternoon, the hottest hour of the day, a
troop of ten men rode up at a gallop, raising a great cloud of dust,
and coming in at the gate drew rein before the verandah. My father as
usual went out to meet them, whereupon they demanded fresh horses in
loud menacing voices.

Indoors we were all gathered in the large sitting-room, waiting the
upshot in a state of intense anxiety, for no preparations had been
made and no means of defence existed in the event of a sudden attack
on the house. We watched the proceedings from the interior, which was
too much in shadow for our dangerous visitors to see that they were
only women and children there and one man, a visitor, who had
withdrawn to the further end of the room and sat leaning back in an
easy chair, trembling and white as a corpse, with a naked sword in his
hand. He explained to us afterwards, when the danger was all over,
that fortunately he was an excellent swordsman, and that having found
the weapon in the room, he had resolved to give a good account of the
ten ruffians if they had made a rush to get in.

My father replied to these men as he had done to the others, assuring
them that he had no horses to give them. Meanwhile we who were indoors
all noticed that one of the ten men was an officer, a beardless young
man of about twenty-one or two, with a singularly engaging face. He
took no part in the proceedings, but sat silent on his horse, watching
the others with a peculiar expression, half contemptuous and half
anxious, on his countenance. And he alone was unarmed, a circumstance
which struck us as very strange. The others were all old veterans,
middle-aged and oldish men with grizzled beards, all in scarlet jacket
and scarlet _chiripa_ and a scarlet cap of the quaint form then worn,
shaped like a boat turned upside down, with a horn-like peak in front,
and beneath the peak a brass plate on which was the number of the
regiment.

The men appeared surprised at the refusal of horses, and stated
plainly that they would not accept it; at which my father shook his
head and smiled. One of the men then asked for water to quench his
thirst. Some one in the house then took out a large jug of cold water,
and my father taking it handed it up to the man; he drank, then passed
the jug on to the other thirsty ones, and after going its rounds the
jug was handed back and the demand for fresh horses renewed in
menacing tones. There was some water left in the jug, and my father
began pouring it out in a thin stream, making little circles and
figures on the dry dusty ground, then once more shook his head and
smiled very pleasantly on them. Then one of the men, fixing his eyes
on my father's face, bent forward and suddenly struck his hand
violently on the hilt of his broadsword and, rattling the weapon, half
drew it from its sheath. This nerve-trying experiment was a complete
failure, its only effect being to make my father smile up at the man
even more pleasantly than before, as if the little practical joke had
greatly amused him.

The strange thing was that my father was not playing a part--that it
was his nature to act in just that way. It is a curious thing to say
of any person that his highest or most shining qualities were nothing
but defects, since, apart from these same singular qualities, he was
just an ordinary person with nothing to distinguish him from his
neighbours, excepting perhaps that he was not anxious to get rich and
was more neighbourly or more brotherly towards his fellows than most
men. The sense of danger, the instinct of self-preservation supposed
to be universal, was not in him, and there were occasions when this
extraordinary defect produced the keenest distress in my mother. In
hot summers we were subject to thunderstorms of an amazing violence,
and at such times, when thunder and lightning were nearest together
and most terrifying to everybody else, he would stand out of doors
gazing calmly up at the sky as if the blinding flashes and world-
shaking thunder-crashes had some soothing effect, like music, on his
mind. One day, just before noon, it was reported by one of the men
that the saddle-horses could not be found, and my father, with his
spy-glass in his hand, went out and ran up the wooden stairs to the
_mirador_ or look-out constructed at the top of the big barn-like
building used for storing wool. The _mirador_ was so high that
standing on it one was able to see even over the tops of the tall
plantation trees, and to protect the looker-out there was a high
wooden railing round it, and against this the tall flag-staff was
fastened. When my father went up to the look-out a terribly violent
thunderstorm was just bursting on us. The dazzling, almost continuous
lightning appeared to be not only in the black cloud over the house
but all round us, and crash quickly followed crash, making the doors
and windows rattle in their frames, while there high above us in the
very midst of the awful tumult stood my father calm as ever. Not
satisfied that he was high enough on the floor of the look-out he had
got up on the topmost rail, and standing on it, with his back against
the tall pole, he surveyed the open plain all round through his spy-
glass in search of the lost horses. I remember that indoors my mother
with white terror-stricken face stood gazing out at him, and that the
whole house was in a state of terror, expecting every moment to see
him struck by lightning and hurled down to the earth below.

A second and in its results a more disastrous shining

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