 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marion Brown, Toronto, Canada. Far Away and Long ago by William Henry Hudson. Chapter 12 The Head of a Decayed House In this chapter I wish to introduce the reader to the last, but one of the half a dozen of our nearest neighbours, selected as typical of the smaller Estancieros, a class of landowners and cattle-breeders then in their decay and probably now fast vanishing. This was Don Anastasio Buena Vida, who was an original person too in his little way. He was one of our very nearest neighbours, his Estancia house being no more than two short miles from us on the south side. Like most of these old establishments, it was a long, low building with a thatched roof, enclosures for cattle and sheep close by, and an old grove or plantation of shade-trees bordered with rows of tall, lombardy poplars. The whole place had a decayed and neglected appearance, the grounds being weedy and littered with bleached bones and other rubbish. Fences and ditches had also been destroyed and obliterated, so that the cattle were free to rub their hides on the tree-trunks and not the bark. The Estancia was called Canada Seca, from a sluggish muddy stream near the house which almost invariably dried up in summer. In winter after heavy rains it overflowed its low banks, and in very wet season lake-like ponds of water were formed all over the low-lying plain between Canada Seca and our house. A rainy season was welcome to us children. The sight of wide sheets of clear shallow water with a vivid green turf beneath excited us joyfully and also afforded us some adventurous days, one of which will be related by and by. Don Estacio Buenavida was a middle-aged man, a bachelor, deeply respected by his neighbors, and even looked on as a person of considerable importance. So much did I hear in his praise that as a child I had a kind of reverential feeling for him, which lasted for years, and did not, I think, wholly evaporate until I was in my teens and began to form my own judgments. He was quite a little man, not more than an inch or two over five feet high, slim with a narrow waist and small lady-like hands and feet. His small oval face was the colour of old parchment. He had large, dark, pathetic eyes, a beautifully shaped black moustache, and long black hair worn in symmetrical ringlets to his shoulders. In his dress, too, he was something of an exquisite. He wore the picturesque gaucho costume, a camiseta or blouse of the finest black cloth profusely decorated with silver buttons, puffs and pleats, and scarlet and green embroidery, a chiripa, the shaw-like garment worn in place of trousers, of the finest yellow or vicona-coloured wool, the white, carcincillos or wide drawers showing below of the finest linen, with more fringe and lacework than was usual in that garment. His boots were well polished, and his poncho or cloak, of the finest blue cloth, lined with scarlet. It must have taken Don Anastasio a couple of hours each morning to get himself up in this fashion, ringlets and all, and once up he did nothing but sit in the living-room, sipping bitter mate and taking part from time to time, in the general conversation, speaking always in low but impressive tones. He would say something about the weather, the lack of superabundance of water according to the season, the condition of his animals and the condition of the pasture, in fact just what everybody else was saying but of more importance as coming from him. All listened to his words with the profoundest attention and respect, and no wonder, since most of those who sat in his living-room, sucking mate, were his poor relations who fed on his bounty. Don Anastasio was the last of a long line of estancieros, once rich in land and cattle, but for generations the Canadaseca estate had been dwindling as land was sold, and now there was little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered about the district knew that he was not only an improvident, but an exceedingly weak and soft-hearted man in spite of his grand manner, and many of the poorest among them had been allowed to build their ranches on his land, and to keep a few animals for their sustenance. Most of these had built their hovels quite close to the Estancia house behind the plantation, so that it was almost like a hamlet at this point. These poor neighbors had the freedom of the kitchen or living-room. It was usually full of them, especially of the women, gossiping, sipping endless mate, and listening with admiring attention to the wise words which fell at intervals from the lips of the head of the family or tribe. All together Don Anastasio in his ringlets was an ineffectual, colorless, effeminate person. A perfect contrast to his ugly, barrel-shaped, badly dressed, but robust-minded neighbor, Gandara. Yet he too had a taste in animals which distinguished him from among his fellow landowners, and even reminded one of Gandara in a ridiculous way, for just as Gandara was devoted to piebald horses, so Don Anastasio was devoted to pigs. It would not have been like him if these had been pigs for profit. They were not animals fit to be fattened for the market, and no person would have thought of buying such beasts. They were of the wild pig breed descended originally from the European animal introduced by the early Spanish colonists, but after two or three centuries of feral life a good deal changed in appearance from their progenitors. This feral pig was called baraco in the vernacular, and was about a third less in size than the domestic animal, with longer legs and more pointed face, and of a uniform deep rust red in color. Among hundreds I never saw one with any black or white on it. I believe that before Don Anastasio's time a few of these wild pigs had been kept as a curiosity at the Estancia, and that when he came into possession he allowed them to increase and roam in herds all over the place, doing much harm by rooting up many acres of the best grazing land in their search after grubs, earthworms, mole crickets, and blind snakes, along with certain roots and bulbs which they liked. This was their only provender when there happened to be no carcasses of cows, horses or sheep for them to feed on in company with the dogs and carrion hawks. He would not allow his pigs to be killed, but probably his poor relations and pensioners were out occasionally by night to stick a pig when beef and mutton were wanting. I never tasted or wanted to taste their flesh. The gaucho is inordinately fond of the two gamiest flavored animals in the pompas, the ostrich, oria, and the hairy armadillo. These I could eat and enjoy eating, although I was often told by English friends that they were too strong for their stomachs. But the very thought of this wild pig flesh produced a sensation of disgust. One day when I was about eight years old I was riding home at a lonely spot three or four miles out, going at a fast gallop by a narrow path through a dense growth of giant thistles, seven or eight feet high, when all at once I saw a few yards before me a big round heap of thistle plants which had been plucked up in tire and built into a shelter from the hot sun about four feet high. As I came close to it a loud savage grunt and the squealing of many little piglets issued from the mound and out from it rushed a furious red sow and charged me. The pony suddenly swerved aside in terror, throwing me completely over on one side, but luckily I had instinctively gripped the mane with both hands and with a violent effort succeeded in getting a leg back over the horse and we swiftly left the dangerous enemy behind. Then remembering all I had been told about the ferocity of these pigs it struck me that I had had an extremely narrow escape, since if I had been thrown off the savage beast would have had me at her mercy and would have certainly killed me in a couple of minutes and as she was probably mad with hunger and thirst in that lonely hot spot with a lot of young to feed it would not have taken her long to devour me, bones and boots included. This sent me thinking on the probable effect of my disappearance, of my mother's terrible anxiety and what they would think and do about it. They would know from the return of the pony that I had fallen somewhere. They would have searched for me all over the surrounding plain especially in all the wilder lonelier places where birds breed, on lands where the cartoon-thistle flourished most and in the vast beds of bulrushes in the marsh but would not have found me and at length when the searching was all over some gaucho riding by that cattle-path through the thistles would catch sight of a piece of cloth, a portion of a boy's garment and the secret of my end would be discovered. I had never liked the red pigs on account of the way they plowed up and disfigured the beautiful green sword with their iron-hard snouts, also because of the powerful and disgusting smell they emitted. But after this adventure with the sow the feeling was much stronger and I wondered more and more why that beautiful soul, Don Anastasio, cherished an affection for these detestable beasts. In spring and early summer the low-lying areas about Canada Secca were pleasant places to see and ride on where the pigs had not to face them. They kept their bright verdure when the higher grounds were parched in brown, then too after rain they were made beautiful with the bright little yellow flower called Macachina. As the Macachina was the first wild flower to blossom in the yard it had as great an attraction to us children as the wild strawberry, ground ivy, salindine and other first blooms for the child in England. Our liking for our earliest flower was all the greater because we could eat it and liked its acid taste, also because it had a bulb very nice to eat, a small round bulb the size of a hazelnut, of a pearly white which tasted like sugar and water. That little sweetness was enough to set us all digging the bulbs up with table knives, but even little children can value things for their beauty as well as taste. The Macachina was like the wood sorrel in shape, both flower and leaf, but the leaves were much smaller and grew close to the ground as the plant flourished most where the grass was close cropped by the sheep, forming a smooth turf like that of our chalkdowns. The flowers were never crowded together like the buttercup, forming sheets of shining yellow, but grew two or three inches apart, each slender stem producing a single flower which stood a couple of inches above the turf. So fine were the stems that the slightest breath of wind would set the blossom swaying, and it was then a pretty sight and often held me motionless in the midst of some green place when all around me for hundreds of yards the green carpet of grass was abundantly sprinkled with thousands of the little yellow blossoms all swaying to the light wind. These green level lands were also a favorite haunt of the golden plover on their first arrival in September from their breeding places many thousands of miles away in the Arctic regions. Later in the season as the water dried up they would go elsewhere. They came in flocks and were then greatly esteemed as a table bird, especially by my father, but we could only have them when one of my elder brothers who was the sportsman of the family went out to shoot them. As a very small boy I was not allowed to use a gun, but as I had been taught to throw the bolas by the little native boys I sometimes associated with, I thought I might be able to procure a few of the birds with it. The bolas used for such an object is a string a couple of yards long, made from fine threads cut from a colt's hide, twisted or braided and a leaden ball at each end, one being the size of a hand's egg, the other less than half the size. The small ball is held in the hand, the other swung round three or four times, and the bolas then launched at the animal or bird one wishes to capture. I spent many hours on several consecutive days following the flocks about on my pony, hurling the bolas at them without bringing down more than one bird. My proceedings were no doubt watched with amusement by the people of the Estancia house, who are often sitting out of doors at the everlasting mate-drinking, and perhaps Don Anastasio did not like it, as he was, I imagine, something of a St. Francis with regard to the lower animals. He certainly loved his abominable pigs. At all events on the last day of my vain efforts to procure golden plover, a big bearded gout-show with hat stuck on the back of his head, rode forth from the house on a large horse, and was passing at a distance of about fifty yards, when he all at once stopped and turning came at a gallop to within a few feet of me, and shouted in a loud voice, Why do you come here, English boy, frightening and chasing away God's little birds? Don't you know that they do no harm to any one? It is wrong to hurt them. And with that he galloped off. I was angry at being rebuked by an ignorant, roughenly gout-show, who, like most of his kind, would tell lies, gamble, cheat, fight, steal, and do other naughty things without a qualm. Besides, it struck me as funny to hear the golden plover, which I wanted for the table, called God's little birds, just as if they were wrens, or swallows, or hummingbirds, or the darling little many-coloured kinglet of the bulrush beds. But I was ashamed, too, and gave up the chase. The nearest of the moist green low-lying spots I have described as lying south of us, between our house and Canada's Saka, was not more than twenty minutes' walk from the gate. It was a flat, oval-shaped area of about fifty acres, and kept its vivid green colour and freshness, when in January the surrounding land was all of a rusty brown colour. It was to us a delightful spot to run about and play on, and though the golden plover did not come there, it was haunted during the summer by small flocks of the pretty buff-coloured sand-piper, a sand-piper with the habits of a plover, one, two, which breeds in the Arctic regions, and spends half the year in southern South America. This green area would become flooded after heavy rains. It was then like a vast lake to us, although the water was not more than about three feet deep, and at such times it was infested with the big venomous toad-like creature called escuerzo in the vernacular, which simply means toad. But naturalists have placed it in quite a different family of the Batracteans and call it seratofris or nada. It is toad-like in form, but more lumpish with a bigger head. It is big as a man's fist, of a vivid green with black symmetrical markings on its back and primrose yellow beneath, a dreadful-looking creature, a toad that preys on the real or common toads, swallowing them alive just as the hamdryad swallows other serpents, venomous or not, and as the crebo of martinique, a big non-venomous serpent kills and swallows the deadly ferre de lance. In summer we had no fear of this creature, as it buries itself in the soil and estivates during the hot dry season and comes forth in wet weather. I never knew any spot where these creatures were more abundant than in that winter lake of ours, and at night in the flooded time we used to lie awake listening to their concerts. The seratofris croaks when angry, and as it is the most trelucent of all Batrakeans, it works itself into a rage if you go near it. Its first efforts at chanting or singing sound like the deep harsh, anger-croak prolonged, but as the time goes on they gradually acquire night by night a less raucous and a louder, more sustained and far-reaching sound. There was always very great variety in the tones, and while some continued deep and harsh, the harshest sound in nature, others were clearer and not unmusical, and in a large number there were always a few in the scattered choir that outsoared all the others in high, long-drawn notes, almost organ-like in quality. Listening to their varied performance one night as we lay in bed, my sporting brother proposed that on the following morning we should drag one of the cattle-trophs to the lake to launch it and go on a voyage in quest of these dangerous, hateful creatures and slay them with our javelins. It was not an impossible scheme, since the creatures were to be seen at this season swimming or floating on the surface, and in our boat or canoe we should also detect them as they moved about over the green sward at the bottom. Accordingly, next morning after breakfast we set out, without imparting our plans to any one, and with great labour dragged the trough to the water. It was a box-shaped thing, about twenty feet long and two feet wide at the bottom and three at the top. We were also provided with three javelins, one for each of us, from my brother's extensive armory. He had about that time been reading ancient history, and fired with the story of old wars when men fought hand to hand, he had dropped guns and pistol for the moment, and set himself with furious zeal to manufacture the ancient weapons—bulls and arrows, pikes, shield, battle-axes and javelins. These last were sticks about six feet long, nicely made of pine wood. He had no doubt bribed the carpenter to make them for him, and pointed with old knife-blades six or seven inches long, ground to a fearful sharpness. Such formidable weapons were not required for our purpose. They would have served well enough if we had been going out against Don Anastasio's fierce and powerful swine. But it was his order, and to his wild and warlike imagination the toad-like creatures were the warriors of some hostile tribe opposing us. I forget if in Asia or Africa which had to be conquered and extirpated. No sooner had we got into our long, awkwardly shaped boat than it capsized and threw us all into the water. That was but the first of some dozen of upsets and fresh drenchings we experienced during the day. However, we succeeded in circumnavigating the lake and crossing it two or three times from side to side, and in slaying seventy or eighty of the enemy with our javelins. At length, when the short midwinter day was in its decline, and we were all feeling stiff and cold and half famished, our commander thought proper to bring the Great Lake battle with awful slaughter of our barbarian foes to an end, and we wearily trudged home in our soaking clothes and squeaking shoes. We were too tired to pay much heed to the little sermon we had expected, and glad to get into dry clothes and sit down to food and tea, than to sit by the fire as close as we could get to it until we all began to sneeze and to feel our throats getting sore and our faces burning hot, and finally when we went burning and shivering with cold to bed we could not sleep, and hark the grand nightly chorus was going on just as usual. No, in spite of the great slaughter we had not exterminated the enemy. On the contrary they appeared to be rejoicing over a great victory, especially when high above the deep harsh notes the long-drawn organ-like sounds of the leaders were heard. How I then wished, when tossing and burning feverishly in bed, that I had rebelled and refused to take part in that day's adventure. I was too young for it, and again and again when thrusting one of the creatures through with my javelin I had experienced a horrible disgust and shrinking at the spectacle. Now in my wakeful hours with that tremendous chanting in my ears it all came back to me and was like a nightmare. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of Far Away and Long Ago. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Christine Blashford. Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson. Chapter 13. A Patriarch of the Pampas. Patriarchs were fairly common in the land of my nativity, grave dignified old men with imposing beards, owners of land and cattle and many horses, though many of them could not spell their own names. Handsome too, some of them with regular features, descendants of good old Spanish families who colonised the wide Pampas in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I do not think I have got one of this sort in the preceding chapters which treat of our neighbours, unless it be Don Anastacio Buena Vida of the corkscrew curls and quaint taste in pigs. Certainly he was of the old landowning class and in his refined features and delicate little hands and feet gave evidence of good blood, but the marks of degeneration were equally plain. He was in a feminine futile person and not properly to be ranked with the Patriarchs. His ugly grotesque neighbour of the Piebald Horses was more like one. I described the people that lived nearest to us, our next door neighbours so to speak, because I knew them from childhood and followed their fortunes when I grew up, and was thus able to give their complete history. The Patriarchs, the grand old gaucho estancieros I came to know, were scattered all over the land, but with one exception. I did not know them intimately from childhood, and though I could fill this chapter with their portraits, I preferred to give it all to the one I knew best, Don Everisto Penalva, a very fine Patriarch indeed. I cannot now remember when I first made his acquaintance, but I was not quite six, though very near it, when I had my first view of his house. In the chapter on some early bird adventures I have described my first long walk on the plains, when two of my brothers took me to a river some distance from home, where I was enchanted with my first sight of that glorious waterfowl, the Flamingo. Now, as we stood on the brink of the flowing water, which had a width of about two hundred yards at that spot when the river had overflowed its banks, one of my elder brothers pointed to a long low house, statched with rushes, about three quarters of a mile distant on the other side of the stream, and informed me that it was the estancia house of Don Everisto Penalva, who was one of the principal landowners in that part. That was one of the images my mind received on that adventurous day which have not faded, the long, low, mud-built house, standing on the wide, empty, treeless plain, with three ancient, half-dead, crooked acacia trees growing close to it, and a little further away a coral or cattle enclosure and a sheepfold. It was a poor, naked, dreary-looking house, without garden or shed, and I dare say a little English boy six years old would have smiled, a little incredulous, to be told that it was the residence of one of the principal landowners in that part. Then, as we have seen, I got my horse, and being delivered from the fear of evil-minded cows with long, sharp horns, I spent a good deal of my time on the plain, where I made the acquaintance of other small boys on horseback, who took me to their homes and introduced me to their people. In this way I came to be a visitor to that lonely-looking house on the other side of the river, and to know all the interesting people in it, including Don Everisto himself, its lord and master. He was a middle-aged man at that date, of medium height, very white-skinned, with long black hair and full beard, straight nose, fine broad forehead, with large dark eyes. He was slow and deliberate in all his movements, grave, dignified and ceremonious in his manner and speech, but in spite of this lofty air he was known to have a sweet and gentle disposition, and was friendly towards everyone, even to small boys who were naturally naughty and a nuisance to their elders. And so it came about that even as a very small, shy boy, a stranger in the house, I came to know that Don Everisto was not one to be afraid of. I hope that the reader, forgetting all he has learned about the domestic life of the patriarchs of an older time, will not begin to feel disgusted at Don Everisto when I proceed to say that he was the husband of six wives, all living with him at that same house. The first, the only one he had been permitted to marry in a church, was Oldas, or rather older than himself. She was very dark and was getting wrinkles, and was the mother of several grown-up sons and daughters, some married. The others were of various ages, the youngest to about thirty, and these were twin sisters, both named Ascension, for they were both born on Ascension Day. So much alike were these Ascensions in face and figure that one day, when I was a big boy, I went into the house and finding one of the sisters there began relating something when she was called out. Presently she came back, as I thought, and I went on with my story just where I had left off, and only when I saw the look of surprise and inquiry on her face did I discover that I was now talking to the other sister. How was this man with six wives regarded by his neighbours? He was esteemed and beloved above most men in his position. If any person was in trouble or distress or suffering from a wound or some secret malady, he would go to Don Everisto for advice and assistance, and for such remedies as he knew, and if he was sick unto death he would send for Don Everisto to come to him to write down his last will and testament. For Don Everisto knew his letters and had the reputation of a learned man among the Gauchos. They considered him better than anyone calling himself a doctor. I remember that his cure for shingles, a common and dangerous ailment in that region, was regarded as infallible. The malady took the form of an eruption, like Erysipolis, on the middle of the body and extending round the waist till it formed a perfect zone. If the zone is not complete I can cure the disease Don Everisto would say. He would send someone down to the river to procure a good-sized toad, then causing the patient to strip. He would take pen and ink and write on the skin in the space between the two ends of the inflamed region, in stout letters, the words, in the name of the father, etc. This done he would take the toad in his hand and gently rub it on the inflamed part, and the toad, enraged at such treatment, would swell himself up almost to bursting and exude a poisonous milky secretion from his warty skin. That was all and the man got well. If it pleased such a man as that to have six wives instead of one, it was right and proper for him to have them. No person would presume to say that he was not a good and wise and religious man on that account. It may be added that Don Everisto, like Henry the Eighth, who also had six wives, was a strictly virtuous man. The only difference was that when he desired a fresh wife he did not barbarously execute or put away the one or the others he already possessed. I lost sight of Don Everisto when I was sixteen, having gone to live in another district about thirty miles from my old home. He was then just at the end of the middle period of life, with a few gray hairs beginning to show in his black beard, but he was still a strong man and more children were being added to his numerous family. Some time later I learned that he had acquired a second estate, a long day's journey on horseback from the first, and that some of his wives and children had emigrated to the New Estancia, and that he divided his time between the two establishments. But his people were not wholly separated from each other, from time to time some of them would take the long journey to visit the absent ones, and there would be an exchange of homes between them, for incredible as it may seem they were in spirit, or appeared to be, a united family. Seven years had passed since I lost sight of them, when it chanced that I was travelling home from the southern frontier, with only two horses to carry me. One gave out, and I was compelled to leave him on the road. I put up that evening at a little wayside pulperia, or public house, and was hospitably entertained by the landlord, who turned out to be an Englishman. But he had lived so long among the Gauchos, having left his country when very young, that he had almost forgotten his own language. Again and again during the evening he started talking in English, as if glad of the opportunity to speak his native tongue once more. But after a sentence or two a word wanted would not come, and it would have to be spoken in Spanish, and gradually he would relapse into unadulterated Spanish again, then becoming conscious of the relapse he would make a fresh start in English. As we sat talking after supper I expressed my intention of leaving early in the morning, so as to get over a few leagues while it was fresh, as the weather was very hot, and I had to consider my one horse. He was sorry not to be able to provide me with another, but at one of the largest stanciers I would come to next morning I would no doubt be able to get one. He then mentioned that in about an hour and a half, or two hours, I should arrive at a stancia named La Paja Brava, where many riding horses were kept. This was good news indeed. La Paja Brava was the name of the estate my ancient friend and neighbour Don Everisto had bought so many years before. No doubt I should find some of the family, and they would give me a horse and anything I wanted. The house, when I approached it next morning, strongly reminded me of the old home of the family many leagues away. Only it was if possible more lonely and dreary an appearance without even an old half-dead acacia tree to make it less desolate. The plain all round as far as one could see was absolutely flat and treeless. The short grass burnt by the January sun to a yellowish brown colour, while at the large watering well half a mile distant the cattle were gathering in vast numbers, bellowing with thirst and raising clouds of dust in their struggles to get to the trough. I found Don Everisto himself in the house, and with him his first and oldest wife, with several of the grown-up children. I was grieved to see the change in my old friend. He had aged greatly in seven years, his face was now white as alabaster, and his full beard and long hair quite grey. He was suffering from some internal malady, and spent most of the day in the large kitchen and living-room resting in an easy chair. The fire burnt all day in the hearth, in the middle of the clay floor, and the women served mate and did their work in a quiet way, talking the while, and all day long the young men and big boys came and went, coming in one or two at a time, to sip mate, smoke, and tell the news, the state of the well, the time the water would last, the condition of the cattle, of horses strayed, and so on. The old first wife had also aged, her whole dark anxious face had been covered with little interlacing wrinkles, but the greatest change was in the eldest child, her daughter, Cipriana, who was living permanently at La Paja Brava. The old mother had a dash of dark or negrine blood in her veins, and this strain came out strongly in the daughter, a tall woman with lustrous crinkled hair of a wrought iron colour, large voluptuous mouth, pale dark skin, and large dark, sad eyes. I remembered that they had not always been sad, for I had known her in her full bloom, an imposing woman, her eyes sparkling with intense fire and passion, who despite her coarse features and dark skin had a kind of strange wild beauty which attracted men. Unhappily she placed her affections on the wrong person, a dashing young gaucho who, albeit landless and poor in cattle, made a brave appearance, especially when mounted and when man and horse glittered with silver ornaments. I recalled how one of my last sights of her had been on a Sunday morning in summer, when I had ridden to a spot on the plane where it was overgrown with giant thistles, standing about ten feet high, in full flower and filling the hot air with their perfume. There, in a small open grassy space, I had dismounted to watch a hawk, in hopes of finding its nest concealed somewhere among the thistles close by, and presently two persons came at a swift gallop by the narrow path through the thistles, and bursting out into that small open spot I saw that it was Sipriana in a white dress, on a big bay horse, and her lover who was leading the way. Catching sight of me they threw me a good morning, and galloped on, laughing gaily at the unexpected encounter. I thought that in the white dress, with the hot sun shining on her, her face flushed with excitement on her big spirited horse, she looked splendid that morning. But she gave herself too freely to her lover, and by and by there was a difference, and he rode away to return no more. It was hard for her then to face her neighbours, and eventually she went away with her mother to live at the new Estancia. But even now at this distance of time it is a pain to remember her when her image comes back to my mind, as I saw her on that chance visit to La Paja Brava. Every evening during my stay, after mate had been served, and there was a long vacant interval before night, she would go out from the gate to a distance of fifty or sixty yards, where an old log was lying on a piece of waste-ground overgrown with nettles, burdock, and red weed, now dead and brown, and sitting on the log, her chin resting on her hand. She would fix her eyes on the dusty road half a mile away, and motionless in that dejected attitude she would remain for about an hour. When you looked closely at her you could see her lips moving, and if you came quite near her you could hear her talking in a very low voice, but she would not lift her gaze from the road nor seem to be aware of your presence. The fit or dream over she would get up and return to the house, where she would quietly set to work with the other women in preparing the great meal of the day, the late supper of roast and boiled meat when all the men would be back from their work with the cattle. That was my last sight of Cipriana, what her end was I never heard nor what was done with the Pah Brava after the death of Don Evaristo, who was gathered to his fathers a year or so after my visit. I only know that the old place where as a child I first knew him, where his cattle and horses grazed and the stream where they were waterbed was alive with herons and spoon-bills, black-necked swans, glossy abuses in clouds, and great blue abuses with resounding voices, is now possessed by aliens who destroy all wild bird-life and grow corn on the land for the markets of Europe. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of Far Away and Long Ago This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Christine Blashford. Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson. Chapter 14 The Dovecut By the side of the moat, at the far end of the enclosed ground, there grew a big red willow, the tree already mentioned in a former chapter as the second largest in the plantation. It had a thick round trunk, wide-spreading horizontal branches and rough bark. In its shape, when the thin foliage was gone, it was more like an old oak than a red willow. This was my favourite tree when I had once mastered the difficult and dangerous art of climbing. It was furthest from the house of all the trees, on a waste weedy spot which no one else visited, and this made it an ideal place for me, and whenever I was in the wild arboreal mood I would climb the willow to find a good-stout branch high up on which to spend an hour, with a good view of the wide green plain before me, and the sight of grazing flocks and herds, and of houses and poplar-grays looking blue in the distance. Here, too, in this tree, I first felt the desire for wings to dream of the delight it would be to circle upwards to a great height and float on the air without effort, like the girl in buzzard and harrier and other great soaring land and water-birds. But from the time this notion and desire began to affect me, I envied most the great crested screamer, an inhabitant then of all the marshes in our vicinity, for here was a bird as big or bigger than a goose, as heavy almost as I was myself, who when he wished to fly rose off the ground with tremendous labour, and then as he got higher and higher flew more and more easily, until he rose so high that he looked no bigger than a lark or pipit, and at that height he would continue floating round and round in vast circles for hours, pouring out those jubilant cries at intervals which sounded to us so far below, like clarion-notes in the sky. If I could only get off the ground like that heavy bird and rise as high, then the blue air would make me as buoyant and let me float all day without pain or effort, like the bird. This desire has continued with me through my life, yet I have never wished to fly in a balloon or airship, since I should then be tied to a machine and have no will or soul of my own. The desire has only been gratified a very few times in that kind of dream called levitation, when one rises and floats above the earth without effort, and is like a ball of thistle down carried by the wind. My favourite red willow was also the chosen haunt of another being, a peregrine falcon, a large, handsome female that used to spend some months each year with us, and would sit for hours every day in the tree. It was an ideal tree for the falcon, too, not only because it was a quiet spot where it could doze the hot hours away in safety, but also on account of the numbers of pigeons we used to keep. The pigeon house, a round, tower-shaped building, whitewashed outside, with a small door always kept locked, was usually tenanted by four or five hundred birds. These cost us nothing to keep, and were never fed as they picked up their own living on the plain, and being strong flyers and well used to the dangers of the open country abounding in hawks, they ranged far from home, going out in small parties of a dozen or more to their various distant feeding grounds. When out riding we used to come on these flocks several miles from home, and knew they were our birds, since no one else in that neighbourhood kept pigeons. They were highly valued, especially by my father, who preferred a broiled pigeon to mutton cutlets for breakfast, and was also fond of pigeon pies. Once or twice every week, according to the season, eighteen or twenty young birds just ready to leave the nest were taken from the dove-cot to be put into a pie of gigantic size, and this was usually the grandest dish on the table when we had a lot of people to dinner or supper. Every day the falcon, during the months she spent with us, took toll of the pigeons, and though these depredations annoyed my father, he did nothing to stop them. He appeared to think that one or two birds a day didn't matter much, as the birds were so many. The falcon's custom was, after dowsing a few hours in the willow, to fly up and circle high in the air above the buildings, whereupon the pigeons, losing their heads in their terror, would rush up in a cloud to escape their deadly enemy. This was exactly what their enemy wanted them to do, and no sooner would they rise to the proper height than she would make her sweep, and singling out her victims strike it down with a blow of her lacerating claws. Down like a stone it would fall, and the hawk, after a moment's pause in mid-air, would drop down after it, and catch it in her talons before it touched the treetops, then carried away to feed on at leisure out on the plain. It was a magnificent spectacle, and although witnessed so often, it always greatly excited me. One day my father went to the galpon, the big barn-like building used for storing wood, hides, and horsehair, and seeing him go up the ladder I climbed up after him. It was an immense vacant place, containing nothing but a number of empty cases on one side of the floor, and empty flower-barrels standing upright on the other. My father began walking about among the cases, and by and by called me to look at a young pigeon, apparently just killed, which he had found in one of the empty boxes. Now how came it to be there, he asked? Rats, no doubt, but how strange and almost incredible it seemed that a rat, however big, had been able to scale the pigeon-house, kill a pigeon, and drag it back a distance of twenty-five yards, then mount with it to the loft, and after all that labour to leave it uneaten. The wonder grew when he began to find more young pigeons, all young birds almost of an age to have left a nest, and only one or two out of half a dozen with any flesh eaten. Here was an enemy to the devcot, who went about at night and did his killing quietly, unseen by any one, and was ten times more destructive than the falcon, who killed her adult old pigeon daily in sight of all the world and in a magnificent way. I left him pondering over the mystery, gradually working himself up into a rage against rats, and went off to explore among the empty-barrels standing upright on the other side of the loft. Another pigeon I shouted presently, filled with pride at the discovery and fishing the bird up from the bottom. He came over to me and began to examine the dead bird, his rats still increasing. Then I shouted gleefully again, another pigeon, and all together I shouted, another pigeon, about five times, and by that time he was in quite a furious temper. Rats, rats, he exclaimed, killing all these pigeons and dragging them up here just to put them away in empty-barrels, who ever heard of such a thing. No stronger language did he use, like the vicar's wonderfully sober-minded daughter, as described by Marjorie Fleming, he never said a single damn, for that was the sort of man he was, but he went back to fuming to his boxes. Meanwhile I continued my investigations, and by and by peering into an empty barrel received one of the greatest shocks I had ever experienced. Down at the bottom of the barrel was a big brown and yellow mottled owl, one of a kind I had never seen, standing with its claws grasping a dead pigeon, and its face turned up an alarm at mine. What a face it was, a round gray disc with black lines, like spokes radiating from the centre, where the beak was, and the two wide-open staring orange-coloured eyes, the wheel-like heads surmounted by a pair of ear or horn-like black feathers. For a few moments we stared at one another, then recovering myself I shouted, Father an owl! For although I had never seen its like before, I knew it was an owl. Not until that moment had I known any owl except the common burrowing owl of the plain, a small gray and white bird, half diurnal in its habits, with a pretty dove-like voice when it hooted round the house of an evening. In a few moments my father came running over to my side, an iron bar in his hand, and looking into the barrel began a furious assault on the bird. This, then, is the culprit he cried. This is the rat that has been destroying my birds by the score, now he's going to pay for it. And so on, striking down with the bar while the bird struggled frantically to rise and make its escape, but in the end it was killed and thrown out on the floor. That was the first and only time I saw my father kill a bird, and nothing but his extreme anger against the robber of his precious pigeons would have made him do a thing so contrary to his nature. He was quite willing to have birds killed—young pigeons, wild ducks, plover, snipe, wimbral, tinamoo or partridge, and various others which he liked to eat—but the killing always had to be done by others. He hated to see any bird kill that was not for the table, and that was why he tolerated the falcon, and even allowed a pair of caranches or carrion eagles, birds destructive to poultry and killers when they got the chance of newly born lambs and sucking pigs, to have their huge nest in one of the old peach trees for several years. I never saw him angrier than once when a visitor staying in the house, going out with his gun one day, suddenly threw it up to his shoulder and brought down a passing swallow. That was my first encounter with the short-eared owl, a world-wondering species known familiarly to the sportsmen in England as the October or Woodcock owl, an inhabitant of the whole of Europe, also of Asia, Africa, America, Australasia, and many Atlantic and Pacific islands. No other bird has so vast a range, yet nobody in the house could tell me anything about it, excepting that it was an owl, which I knew, and no such bird was found in our neighbourhood. Several months later I found out more about it, and this was when I began to ramble about the plain on my pony. One of the most attractive spots to me at that time, when my expeditions were not yet very extended, was a low-lying moist stretch of ground about a mile and a half from home, where on account of the moisture it was always a vivid green. In spring it was like a moist meadow in England, a perfect garden of wild flowers, and as it was liable to become flooded in wet winters it was avoided by the viscatchers, the big rodents that make their warrens or villages of huge buries all over the plain. Here I used to go in quest of the most charming flowers which were not found in other places, one a special favorite on account of its delicious fragrance being the small lily called by the natives Lagrimas de la Virgin, tears of the Virgin. Here at one spot the ground to the extent of an acre or so was occupied by one plant of a peculiar appearance to the complete exclusion of the tall grasses and herbage in other parts. It grew in little tussocks like bushes, each plant composed of twenty or thirty stalks of a woody toughness, and about two and a half feet high. The stems were thickly clothed with round leaves, soft as velvet to the touch, and so darker green that at a little distance they looked almost black against the bright green of the moist turf. Their beauty was in the blossoming season when every stem produced its dozen or more flowers growing singly among the leaves in size and shape like dog roses, the petals of the purest, loveliest yellow. As the flowers grew close to the stalk, to gather them it was necessary to cut the stalk at the root with all its leaves and flowers. And this I sometimes did to take it to my mother who had a great love of wild flowers. But no sooner would I start with a bunch of flowering stalks in my hand than the lovely delicate petals would begin to drop off, and before I was halfway home there would not be a petal left. This extreme frailty or sensitiveness used to infect me with the notion that this flower was something more than a mere flower, something like a sentient being, and that it had a feeling in it which caused it to drop its shining petals and perish when removed from its parent root and home. One day in the plant's blossoming time I was slowly walking my pony through the dark bottle green tufts when a big yellowish, tawny owl got up a yard or so from the hooves and I instantly recognized it as the same sort of bird as our mysterious pigeon killer. And there on the ground where it had been was its nest, just a slight depression with a few dry vents by way of lining and five round white eggs. From that time I was a frequent visitor to the owls, and for three summers they bred at the same spot in spite of the anxiety they suffered on my account, and I saw and grew familiar with their quaint looking young, clothed in white down and with long narrow-pointed heads, more like the heads of aquatic birds than of round-headed flat-faced owls. Later I became even better acquainted with the short-eared owl. A year or several years would sometimes pass without one being seen, then all at once they would come in numbers, and this was always when there had been a great increase in field mice and other small rodents, and the owl population all over the country had in some mysterious way become aware of the abundance and had come to get their share of it. At these times you could see the owls abroad in the late afternoon before sunset, in quest of prey, quartering the ground like harriers and dropping suddenly into the grass at intervals, while at dark the air resounded with their solemn hooting, as sound as of a deep-voiced mastiff baying at a great distance. As I have mentioned our famous pigeon pies when describing the dove-cut, I may as well conclude this chapter with a fuller account of our way of living as to food, a fascinating subject to most persons. The psychologists tell us the sad truth when they say that taste, being the lowest or least intellectual of our five senses, is incapable of registering impressions on the mind. Consequently we cannot recall or recover vanished flavours as we can recover, and mentally see and hear long-past sights and sounds. Smells too when we see smelling, vanish and return not, only we remember that blossoming orange-grave where we once walked, and beds of wild-time and penny-royal when we sat on the grass, also flowering bean and lucerne fields, filled in fed-us, body and soul with delicious perfumes. In like manner we can recollect the good things we consumed long years ago, the things we cannot eat now because we are no longer capable of digesting and assimilating them. It is like recalling past perilous adventures by land and water in the brave young days when we love danger for its own sake. There was, for example, the salad of cold-sliced potatoes and onions drenched in oil and vinegar, a glorious dish with cold meat to go to bed on, also hot maize-meal cakes eaten with syrup at breakfast, and other injudicious cakes. As a rule, it was a hot breakfast and midday dinner and afternoon tea with hot bread and scones and peach preserve and a late cold supper. For breakfast, mutton cutlets, coffee, and things made with maize, eggs were plentiful, eggs of fowl, duck, goose, and wild fowl's eggs, wild duck and plover in their season. In spring, August to October, we occasionally had an ostrich or rear's egg in the form of a huge omelette at breakfast, and it was very good. The common native way of cooking it by thrusting a rod heated red through the egg, then burying it in the hot ashes to complete the cooking, did not commend itself to us. From the end of July to the end of September, we feasted on plover's eggs at breakfast. In appearance and taste, they were precisely like our lapwing's eggs, only larger, the Argentine lapwing being a bigger bird than its European cousin. In those distant days, the birds were excessively abundant all over the campus where sheep were pastured, for at that time there were few to shoot wild birds, and nobody ever thought of killing a lapwing for the table. The country had not then been overrun by bird-destroying immigrants from Europe, especially by Italians. Outside of the sheep's own in the exclusively cattle-raising country, where the rough Pampers grasses in Herbage had not been eaten down, the plover was sparsely distributed. I remember that one day, when I was thirteen, I went out one morning after breakfast to look for plover's eggs, just at the beginning of the laying season, when all the eggs one found were practically new laid. My plan was that of the native boys, to go at a fast gallop over the plain and mark the spot far ahead where a lapwing was seen to rise and fly straight away to some distance. For this method some training is necessary to success, as in many cases more birds than one, sometimes as many as three or four, would be seen to rise at various points and distances, and one had to mark and keep in memory the exact spots to visit them successively and find the nests. The English method of going out and quartering the ground in search of a nest in likely places where the bird's breed was too slow for us. The nests I found that morning contained one or two and sometimes three eggs, very rarely the full clutch of four. Before midday I had got back with a bag of sixty-four eggs, and that was the largest number I ever gathered at one time. Our dinner consisted of meat and pumpkin, boiled or baked, maize in the milk in its season, and sweet potatoes, besides the other common vegetables and salads. Maize meal puddings and pumpkin pies and tarts were common with us, but the sweet we loved best was a peach pie, made like an apple pie with a crust, and these came in about the middle of February and lasted until April or even May, when our late variety, which we called winter peach, ripened. My mother was a clever and thrifty housekeeper, and I think she made more of the peach than any other resident in the country who possessed an orchard. Her peach preserves, which lasted us the year round, were celebrated in our neighbourhood. Peach preserves were in most English houses, but our house was alone in making pickled peaches. I think this was an invention of her own. I do not know if it has taken on, but we always had pickled peaches on the table, and preferred them to all other kinds, and so did every person who tasted them. I here recall an amusing incident with regard to our pickled peaches, and will relate it just because it serves to bring in yet another of our old native neighbours. I never thought of him when describing the others, as he was not so near us, and we saw little of him and his people. His name was Benchura Gutierre, and he called himself an Estanciero, a landowner and head of a cattle establishment, but there was very little land left, and practically no cattle, only a few cows, a few sheep, a few horses. His estate had been long crumbling away, and there was hardly anything left, but he was a brave spirit, and had a genial, breezy manner, and dressed well in the European mode, with trousers and coat and waistcoat, this last garment being of satin and a very bright blue. And he talked incessantly of his possessions, his house, his trees, his animals, his wife and daughters, and he was immensely popular in the neighbourhood, no doubt because he was the father of four rather good-looking, marriageable girls. And as he kept open house, his kitchen was always full of visitors, mostly young men, who sipped mate by the hour and made themselves agreeable to the girls. One of Don Ventura's most delightful traits, that is, to us young people, was his loud voice. I think it was a convention in those days for estancieros or cattlemen to raise their voices according to their importance in the community, when several gouchos are galloping over the plain, chasing horses, hunting, or marking cattle. The one who is head of the gang shouts his directions at the top of his voice, probably in this way the habit of shouting at all times by landowners and persons in authority had been acquired. And so it pleased us very much when Don Ventura came one evening to see my father, and consented to sit down to partake of supper with us. We loved to listen to his shouted conversation. My parents apologized for having nothing but cold meats to put before him, cold shoulder of mutton, a bird and pickles, cold pie, and so on. True, he replied, cold meat is never or rarely eaten by man on the plains. People do have cold meat in the house, but that as a rule is where there are children. For when a child is hungry and cries for food, his mother gives him a bone of cold meat. Just as in other countries where bread is common, you give a child a piece of bread. However, he would try cold meat for once. It looked to him as if there were other things to eat on the table. And what is this, he shouted, pointing dramatically at a dish of large, very green-looking pickled peaches. Peaches, peaches in winter, this is strange indeed. It was explained to him that they were pickled peaches, and that it was the custom of the house to have them on the table at supper. He tried one with his cold mutton, and was presently assuring my parents that never in his life had he partaken of anything so good, so tasty, so appetizing. And whether or not it was because of the pickled peaches, or some quality in our mutton, which made it unlike all other mutton, he had never enjoyed a meal as much. What he wanted to know was how the thing was done. He was told that large, sound fruit, just ripening, must be selected for pickling when the finger-denser peach it is too ripe. The selected peaches are washed and dried and put into a cask, then boiling vinegar with a handful of clothes is poured in till it covers the fruit. The cask closed and left for a couple of months, by which time the fruit would be properly pickled. Two or three casksful were prepared in this way each season and served us for the entire year. It was a revelation, he said, and lamented that he and his people had not this secret before. He too had a peach orchard, and when the fruit ripened, his family, assisted by all their neighbours, feasted from morning till night on peaches, and hardly left room in their stomachs for roast meat when it was dinnertime. The consequence was that in very few weeks he could almost say days. The fruit was all gone, and they had to say, No more peaches for another twelve months. All that would now be changed. He would command his wife and daughters to pickle peaches, a caskful, or two or three if one would not be enough. He would provide vinegar, many gallons of it, and cloves by the handful, and when they had got their pickled peaches he would have cold mutton for supper every day all the year round, and enjoy his life as he had never done before. This amused us very much, as we knew that poor Don Ventura, notwithstanding his loud commanding voice, had little or no authority in his house, that it was ruled by his wife, assisted by a council of four marriageable daughters, whose present objects in life were little dances and other amusements, and lovers with courage enough to marry them, or carry them off. CHAPTER XV It is not an uncommon thing, I fancy, for a child or boy to be more deeply impressed and stirred at the sight of a snake than of any other creature. This at all events is my experience. Birds certainly gave me more pleasure than other animals, and this too is no doubt common with children, and I take the reason of it to be not only because birds exceed in beauty, but also on account of the intensity of life they exhibit. A life so vivid, so brilliant, has to make that of other beings, such as reptiles and mammals, seem a rather poor thing by comparison. But while birds were more than all other beings to me, mammals too had a great attraction. I have already spoken of rats, opossums, and armadillos, also of the viscasa, the big burrowing rodent that made his villages all over the plain. One of my early experiences is of the tremendous outcry these animals would make at night when suddenly startled by a very loud noise, as by a clap of thunder. When we had visitors from town, especially persons new to the country, who did not know the viscasa, they would be taken out after supper, a little distance from the house, when the plain was all dark and profoundly silent, and after standing still for a few minutes to give them time to feel the silence, a gun would be discharged, and after two or three seconds the report would be followed by an extraordinary hullabaloo, a wild outcry of hundreds and thousands of voices, from all over the plain for miles around, voices that seemed to come from hundreds of different species of animal, so varied they were, from the deepest booming sounds to the high shrieks and squeals of shrill-voiced birds, our visitors used to be filled with astonishment. Another animal that impressed us deeply and painfully was the skunk. They were fearless little beasts, and in the evening would come quite boldly about the house, and if seen and attacked by a dog, they would defend themselves in the awful smelling liquid they discharged at an adversary. When the wind brought a whiff of it to the house, when all the doors and windows stood open, it would create a panic, and people would get up from the table feeling a little seasick, and go in search of some room where the smell was not. Another powerful smelling, but very beautiful creature, was the common deer. I began to know it from the age of five, when we went to our new home, and where we children were sometimes driven with our parents to visit some neighbors several miles away. There were always herds of deer on the lands where the cardoon thistle flourished most, and it was a delight to come upon them and see their yellow figures standing among the gray-green cardoon bushes, gazing motionless at us, then turning and rushing away with a whistling cry, and sending out gusts of their powerful musky smell, which the wind sometimes brought to our nostrils. But there was a something in the serpent which produced a quite different and a stronger effect on the mind than birds or mammal or any other creature. The sight of it was always startling, and however often seen, always produced a mixed sense of amazement and fear. The feeling was no doubt acquired from our elders. They regarded snakes as deadly creatures, and as a child I did not know that they were mostly harmless, that it was just as senseless to kill them as to kill harmless and beautiful birds. I was told that when I saw a snake I must turn and run for my life until I was a little bigger, and then on seeing a snake I was to get a long stick and kill it. And it was furthermore impressed upon me that snakes are exceedingly difficult to kill, that many persons believe that a snake never really dies till the sun sets. Therefore, when I killed a snake, in order to make it powerless to do any harm between the time of killing it and sunset, it was necessary to pound it to a pulp with the aforesaid long stick. With such teachings it was not strange that even as a small boy I became a persecutor of snakes. Snakes are common enough about us, snakes of seven or eight different kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky mottled in dry and barren places, and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling-rooms, and it all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old foundations of the house, and under the flooring. In winter they hibernated there, tangled together in a cluster, no doubt, and in summer nights, when they were at home, coiled at their ease or gliding ghost-like about the subterranean apartments. I would lie awake and listen to them by the hour, for although it may be news to some closet ophiologists, serpents are not all so mute as we think them. At all events this kind, the philodryphus eastevis, a beautiful and harmless column-bind snake, two-and-a-half to three feet long, marked all over with inky black on a vivid green ground, not only emitted a sound when lying undisturbed in its den, but several individuals would hold a conversation together which seemed endless. For I generally fell asleep before it finished. A hissing conversation it is true, but not unmodulated or without considerable variety in it. A long cibulation would be followed by distinctly heard ticking sounds, as of a husky ticking clock, and after ten or twenty or thirty ticks another hiss, like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it, as of a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease than another would begin, and so it would go on, demand and response, strofe and antistrofe, and at intervals several voices would unite in a kind of low, mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss. While I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled, it was dark in the room and to my excited imagination the serpents were no longer under the floor, but out gliding hither and tither over it, with uplifted heads in a kind of mystic dance, and I often shivered to think what my bare feet might touch if I were to thrust a leg out and let it hang over the bedside. I'm shut in a dark room with a candle blown out, pathetically cried old farmer Fleming, when he heard of his beautiful daughter Dalia's clandestine departure to a distant land with a nameless lover. I've heard of a sort of fear you have in that dilemma, least you should lay your fingers on edges of sharp knives, and if I think a step, if I go thinking a step, and feel my way, I do cut myself, and I bleed I do. Only in a comparatively snakeless country could such fancies be borne and such metaphors used, snakeless and highly civilized, where the blades of Sheffield are cheap and abundant, in rudder lands where Ophalidians abound as in India and South America, in the dark one fears the cold living coil and deadly sudden fang. Serpents were fearful things to me in that period, but whatsoever is terrible and dangerous or so reported has an irresistible attraction for the mind, whether of child or man. It was therefore always a pleasure to have seen a snake in the day's rambles, although the sight was a startling one. Also in the warm season it was a keen pleasure to find the cast slough of the feared and subtle creature, here as something not the serpent, yet so much more than a mere picture of it, a dead and cast off part of it, but in its completeness from the segmented mask with the bright unseeing eyes to the fine whip-like tail end, so like the serpent itself I could handle it, handle the serpent as it were, yet be in no danger from a feminist tooth or stinging tongue. True it was colorless, but silvery bright, soft as satin to the touch, crinkling when handled with a sound that to the startled fancy recalled the dangerous living hiss from the dry rustling grass. I would clutch my prize with a fearful joy as if I had picked up a strange feather dropped in passing from the wing of one of the fallen, but still beautiful angels, and it always increased my satisfaction when, on exhibiting my treasure at home, the first sight of it caused a visible start or an exclamation of alarm. When my courage and strength were sufficient, I naturally began to take an active part in the persecution of serpents, for was not I also of the seed of Eve, nor can I say when my feelings toward our bruised enemy began to change, but an incident which I witnessed at this time when I was about eight had, I think, a considerable influence on me. At all events it caused me to reflect on a subject which had not previously seemed one for reflection. I was in the orchard following in the rear of a party of grown-up persons, mostly visitors to the house, when among the foremost there were sudden screams, gestures of alarm, and a precipitate retreat. A snake had been discovered lying in the path and almost trodden upon. One of the men, the first to find a stick or perhaps the most courageous, rushed to the front and was about to deal a killing blow when his arm was seized by one of the ladies and the blow arrested. Then, stooping quickly, she took the creature up in her hands and, going away to some distance from the others, released it in the long green grass, green in color as its glittering skin and as cool to the touch. Long ago, as this happened, it is just as vivid to my mind as if it had happened yesterday. I can see her coming back to us through the orchard trees, her face shining with joy, because she had rescued the reptile from imminent death. Her return greeted with loud expressions of horror and amazement, which she only answered with a little laugh and the question, Why should you kill it? But why was she glad, so innocently glad, as it seemed to me, as if she had done some meritorious and no evil thing? My young mind was troubled at the question, and there was no answer. Nevertheless, I think that this incident bore fruit and taught me to consider whether it might not be better to spare than to kill, better not only for the animal spared, but for the soul. And the woman who did this unusual thing, and in doing it unknowingly dropped a minute seed into a boy's mind, who was she? Perhaps it would be as well to give a brief account of her, although I thought that I had finished with the subject of our neighbors. She and her husband, a man named Matthew Blake, were our second nearest English neighbors, but they lived a good deal further than the roids, and were seldom visited by us. To me there was nothing interesting in them and their surroundings, as they had no family and no people but the native peons about them, and above all no plantation where birds could be seen. They were typical English people of the lower middle class, who read no books and conversed with considerable misuse of the aspirate about nothing but their own and their neighbor's affairs. Physically Mr. Blake was a very big man, being six foot three in height and powerfully built. He had a round, ruddy face, clean shaved except for a pair of side whiskers, and pale blue shallow eyes. He was invariably dressed in black cloth, his garments being homemade and too large for him. The baggy trousers thrust into his long boots. Mr. Blake was nothing to us but a huge, serious, somewhat silent man, who took no notice of small boys, and was clumsy and awkward and spoke very bad Spanish. He was well spoken of by his neighbors, and was regarded as a highly respectable and dignified person, but he had no intimates and was one of those unfortunate persons not rare among the English, who appeared to stand behind a high wall and, whether they deserved it or not, have no power to approach and mix with their fellow-beings. I think he was about forty-five to fifty years old when I was eight. His wife looked older, and was a short, ungraceful woman with a stoop, wearing a sun-bonnet and sack, and a faded gown made by herself. Her thin hair was of a yellowish gray tint. Her eyes pale blue, and there was a sunburst redness on her cheeks, but the face had a faded and weary look. But she was better than her giant husband, and was glad to associate with her fellows, and was also a lover of animals—horses, dogs, cats, and any and every wild creature that came in her way. The Blake's had been married a quarter of a century or longer, and had spent at least twenty years of their childless, solitary life in a mud-built ranch, sheep farming on the Pampas, and had slowly accumulated a small fortune, until now they were possessed of about a square league of land with twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand sheep, and had built themselves a big, ugly brick house to live in. They had thus secured the prize for which they had gone so many thousands of miles, and had toiled for so many years, but they were certainly not happy. Poor Mr. Blake, cut off from his fellow creatures by that wall that stood before him, had found companionship in the bottle, and was seen less and less of by his neighbors. And when his wife came to us to spend two or three days for a change, although her home was only a couple of hours right away, the reason probably was that her husband was in one of his bouts, and had made the place intolerable to her. I remember that she always came to us with a sad, depressed look on her face, but after a few hours she would recover her spirits and grow quite cheerful and talkative. And of an evening, when there was music, she would sometimes consent, after some persuasion, to give the company a song. That was a joy to us youngsters, as she had a thin, cracked voice that always at the high notes went off into a falsetto. Her favorite air was home sweet home, and her rendering in her wailing, cracked voice was as great a feast to us as the strange laugh of our grotesque neighbor, Gandara. And that is all I can say about her. But now, when I remember that episode of The Snake in the Orchard, she looks to me not unbeautiful in memory, and her voice in the choir invisible, sounds sweet enough. FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO. CHAPTER XVI It was not until after the episode related in the last chapter, and the discovery that a serpent was not necessarily dangerous to human beings. Therefore a creature to be destroyed at sight and pounded to a pulp, least it should survive and escape before sunset, that I began to appreciate its unique beauty and singularity. Then, somewhat later, I met with an adventure which produced another and a new feeling in me. That sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous and semi-barbarous countries and in others, like Hindustan, which have inherited an ancient civilization. The snakes I was familiar with as a boy up to this time were all of comparatively small size, the largest being the snake with a cross described in an earlier chapter. The biggest specimen I have ever found of this Ophidian was under four feet in length, but the body was thick, as in all the pit-pipers. Then there was the green and black snake described in the last chapter, an inhabitant of the house, which seldom exceeded three feet, and another of the same genus, the most common snake in the country. One seldom took a walk or a ride on the plain without seeing it. It was in size and shape like our common grass snake, and was formerly classed by naturalist in the same genus. Coronella. It is quite beautiful, the pale greenish gray body, modeled with black, being decorated with two parallel bright red lines, extending from the neck to the tip of the fine-pointed tail. Of the others the most interesting was a still smaller snake, brightly colored, the belly with alternate bands of crimson and bright blue. This snake was regarded by everyone as exceedingly venomous and most dangerous on account of its irascible temper and habit of coming at you and hissing loudly, its head and neck raised, and striking at your legs. But this was all swagger on the snake's part. It was not venomous at all, and could do no more harm by biting than a young dove in its nest by pulling itself up and striking at an intrusive hand with its soft beak. Then one day I came upon a snake quite unknown to me. I had never heard of the existence of such a snake in our parts, and I imagined its appearance would have strongly affected any one in any land, even in those abounding in big snakes. The spot, too, in our plantation where I found it, served to make its singular appearance more impressive. There existed at that time a small piece of waste-ground about half an acre in extent, where there were no trees and where nothing planted by man would grow. It was at the far end of the plantation, adjoining the thicket of fennel and the big red willow tree on the edge of the moat, described in another chapter. This ground had been plowed and dug up again and again, and planted with trees and shrubs of various kinds, which were supposed to grow on any soil, but they had always languished and died, and no wonder, since the soil was a hard white clay resembling china clay. But although trees refused to grow there, it was always clothed in a vegetation of its own. All the hardiest weeds were there, and covered the entire barren area to the depth of a man's knees. The weeds had thin, wiry stalks, and small, sickly leaves, and flowers, and would die each summer long before their time. This barren piece of ground had a great attraction for me as a small boy, and I visited it daily and would roam about it among the miserable half-dead weeds with the sun-baked clay showing between the brown stalks, as if it delighted me as much as the alfalfa field, blue and fragrant in its flowering time, and swarming with butterflies. One hot day in December I had been standing perfectly still for a few minutes among the dry weeds when a slight rustling sound came from near my feet, and glancing down I saw the head and neck of a large black serpent moving slowly past me. In a moment or two the flat head was lost to sight among the close growing weeds, but the long body continued moving slowly by, so slowly that it hardly appeared to move, and as the creature must have been not less than six feet long and probably more, it took a very long time. While I stood thrilled with terror, not daring to make the slightest movement gazing down upon it. Although so long it was not a thick snake, and as it moved on over the white ground it had the appearance of a cold black current flowing past me, a current not of water or of other liquid, but of some such element as quicksilver moving on in a rope-like stream. At last it vanished, and turning I fled the ground, thinking that never again would I venture into or near that frightfully dangerous spot in spite of its fascination. Nevertheless I did venture. The image of that black mysterious serpent was always in my mind from the moment of waking in the morning till I fell asleep at night, yet I never said a word about the snake to any one it was my secret, and I knew it was a dangerous secret, but I did not want to be told not to visit that spot again, and I simply could not keep away from it. The desire to look again at that strange being was too strong. I began to visit the place again, day after day, and would hang around about the borders of the barren, weedy ground, watching and listening, and still no black serpent appeared. Then one day I ventured, though in fear and trembling, to go right in among the weeds, and still finding nothing, began to advance step by step till I was right in the middle of the weedy ground, and stood there a long time, waiting and watching. All I wanted was just to see it once more, and I had made up my mind that immediately on its appearance, if it did appear, I would take to my heels. It was when standing in this central spot that once again that slight rustling sound, like that of a few days before, reached my straining sense, and sent an icy chill down my back, and there within six inches of my toes appeared the black head and neck, followed by the long seemingly endless body. I dared not move, since to have attempted flight might have been fatal. The weeds were thinnest here, and the black head and slow-moving black coil could be followed by the eye for a little distance. About a yard from me there was a hole in the ground, about the circumference of a breakfast cup at the top, and into this hole the serpent put his head, and slowly, slowly, drew himself in, while I stood waiting until the whole body to the tip of the tail had banished and all danger was over. I had seen my wonderful creature, my black serpent, unlike any serpent in the land, and the excitement following the first thrill of terror was still on me, but I was conscious of an element of delight in it, and I would not now resolve not to visit the spot again. Still, I was in fear, and kept away three or four days. Thinking about the snake, I formed the conclusion that the hole he had taken refuge in was his den, where he lived, that he was often outroaming about in search of prey, and could hear footsteps at a considerable distance, and that when I walked about in that spot my footsteps disturbed him, and caused him to go straight to his hole to hide himself from a possible danger. It struck me that if I went to the middle of the ground, and stationed myself near the hole, I would be sure to see him. It would indeed be difficult to see him any other way, since one could never know in which direction he had gone out to seek for food. But no, it was too dangerous. The serpent might come upon me unawares, and would probably resent always finding a boy hanging about his den. Still, I could not endure to think that I had seen the last of him. And day after day I continued to haunt the spot, and going a few yards into the little weedy wilderness would stand and peer, and at the slightest rustling sound of an insect or falling leaf would experience a thrill of fearful joy, and still the black, majestical creature failed to appear. One day in my eagerness and impatience I pushed my way through the crowded weeds right to the middle of the ground, and gazed with a mixed delight and fear at the hole. Would he find me here, as on a former occasion? Would he come? I held my breath. I strained my sight and hearing in vain. The hope and fear of his appearance gradually died out, and I left the place bitterly disappointed, and walked to a spot about fifty yards away, where mulberry trees grew on the slope of the mound inside the moat. Looking up into the masses of big clustering leaves over my head I spied a bat hanging suspended from a twig. The bats, I must explain, in that part of the world, that illuminable plain where there were no caverns and old buildings, and other dark places to hide in by day, are not so intolerant of the bright light as in other lands. They do not come forth until evening, but by day they are content to hitch themselves to the twig of a tree under a thick cluster of leaves and rest there until it is dark. Gazing up at this bat, suspended under a big green leaf, wrapped in his black and buff-colored wings, as a mantle, I forgot my disappointment, forgot the serpent, and was so entirely taken up with the bat that I paid no attention to a sensation like a pressure or a dull pain on the instep of my right foot. Then the feeling of pressure increased, and was very curious, and was as if I had a heavy object like a crowbar lying across my foot, and at length I looked down at my feet, and to my amazement and horror spied the great black snake slowly drawing its long coil across my instep. I dared not move, but gazed down fascinated with the sight of that glistening black cylindrical body drawn so slowly over my foot. He had come out of the moat, which was riddled at the sides with rat-holes, and had most probably been there hunting for rats, when my wandering footsteps disturbed him and sent him home to his den, and making straight for it as his way was he came to my foot, and instead of going round threw himself over it. After the first spasm of terror I knew I was perfectly safe that he would not turn upon me so long as I remained quiescent, and would presently be gone from sight. And that was my last sight of him. In vain I watched and waited for him to appear on many subsequent days, but that last encounter had left me a sense of a mysterious being, dangerous on occasion as when attacked or insulted, and able in some cases to inflict death with a sudden blow, but harmless and even friendly or beneficent toward those who regarded it with kindly and reverent feelings in place of hatred. It is in part the feeling of the Hindu with regard to the cobra which inhabits his house and may one day accidentally cause his death, but is not to be persecuted. Possibly something of that feeling about servants has survived in me, but in time as my curiosity about all wild creatures grew as I looked more on them with the naturalist eye the mystery of the large black snake pressed for an answer it seemed impossible to believe that any species of snake of large size and black as jet or anthracite coal in color would exist in any inhabited country without being known. Yet no person I interrogated on the subject had ever seen or heard of such an Ophidian. The only conclusion appeared it to be that this snake was the sole one of its kind in the land. Eventually I heard of the phenomenon of milanism in animals, less rare in snakes, perhaps, than in animals of other classes, and I was satisfied that the problem was partly solved. My serpent was a black individual of a species of some other color, but it was not one of our common species, not one of those I knew. It was not a thick, blunt-bodied serpent like our feminist pit viper, our largest snake, and though in shape it conformed to our two common harmless species it was twice as big as the biggest specimens I had ever seen of them. Then I recalled that two years before my discovery of the black snake our house had been visited by a large unknown snake which measured two or three inches over six feet and was similar in form to my black serpent. The color of this strange and unwelcome visitor was a pale greenish gray with numerous dull black mottlings in small spots. The story of its appearance is perhaps worth giving. It happened that I had a baby sister who could just tattle about on two lakes, having previously gone on all fours. One mid-summer day she was taken up and put on a rug in the shade of a tree twenty-five yards from the sitting-room door and left alone there to amuse herself with her dolls and toys. After half an hour or so she appeared at the door of the sitting-room where her mother was at work and standing there with wide open astonished eyes and moving her hand and arm as to point to the place where she came from she uttered the mysterious word cuckoo. It was a wonderful word which the southern South American mother teaches her child from the moment it begins to tattle and is useful in a desert and sparsely inhabited country where biting, stinging, and other injurious creatures are common. For babies, when they learn to crawl and to walk, are eager to investigate and have no natural sense of danger. Take as an illustration the case of the gigantic hairy-brown spider which is excessively abundant in summer and has the habit of wandering about as if always seeking something, something it cannot find, it knows not what. And in these wanderings it comes in the open door and rambles about the room. At the sight of such a creature the baby is snatched up with the cry of cuckoo and the intruder slain with a broom or other weapon and thrown out. Cuckoo means dangerous, and the terrified gestures and expression of the nurse or mother when using the word sink into the infant mind and when that sound or word is heard there is an instant response as in the case of a warning note or cry uttered by a parent bird which causes the young to fly away or crouch down and hide. The child's gestures and the word used caused her mother to run to the spot where it had been left in the shade and to her horror she saw there a huge serpent coiled up in the middle of the rug. Her cries brought my father on the scene and seizing a big stick he promptly dispatched the snake. The child, said everybody, had had a marvelous escape as she had never previously seen a snake and could not intuitively know it was dangerous or cuckoo. It was conjectured that she had made some gesture or attempt to push the snake away when it came to the rug and that it had reared its head and struck viciously at her. Recalling this incident I concluded that this unknown serpent which had been killed because it wanted to share my baby sister's rug and my black serpent were one and the same species, possibly they had been mates, and that they had strayed a distance away from their native place or else were the last survivors of a colony of their kind in our plantation. It was not until twelve or fourteen years later that I discovered that it was even as I had conjectured, at a distance of about forty miles from my home or rather from the home of my boyhood where I no longer lived, I found a snake that was new to me, the philodorious scotty of naturalists, a not uncommon Argentine snake, and recognized it as the same species as the one found coiled up on my little sister's rug and presumably as my mysterious black serpent. Some of the specimens which I measured exceeded six feet in length. End of Chapter 16. Far Away and Long Ago. CHAPTER XVII. These serpent memories, particularly the enduring image of that black serpent which, when recalled, restores most vividly the emotion experienced at the time, served to remind me of a subject not yet mentioned in my narrative. This is animism or that sense of something in nature which to the enlightened or civilized man is not there, and in the civilized man's child, if it be admitted that he has it at all, is but a faint survival of a phase of the primitive mind, and by animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature but the tendency or impulse or instinct in which all myth originates to animate all things, the projection of ourselves into nature, the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all visible things. It persists and lives in many of us. I imagine more than we like to think, or more than we know, especially in those born and bred amidst rural surroundings where there are hills and woods and rocks and streams and waterfalls, these being the conditions which are most favorable to it, the scenes which have inherited associations for us, as Herbert Spencer has said, in large towns and all populous places where nature has been tamed till it appears like a part of man's work, almost as artificial as the buildings he inhabits. It withers and dies so early in life that its faint imitations are soon forgotten, and we come to believe that we have never experienced them. That such a feeling can survive in any man, or that there was ever a time since his infancy when he could have regarded this visible world as anything but what it actually is, the stage to which he has been summoned to play his brief but important part with painted blue and green scenery for background becomes incredible. Nevertheless, I know that in one, old as I am, this same primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood still persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it. It is difficult, impossible, I am told, for anyone to recall his boyhood exactly as it was. It could not have been what it seems to the adult mind since we cannot escape from what we are. However great our detachment may be, and in going back we must take our present selves with us. The mind has taken a different color, and this is thrown back upon our past. The poet has reversed the order of things when he tells us that we come trailing clouds of glory which melt away and are lost as we proceed on our journey. The truth is that unless we belong to the order of those who crystallize or lose their souls on their passage, the clouds gather about us as we proceed, and as cloud compelers we travel on to the very end. Another difficulty in the way of those who write of their childhood is an unconscious artistry will steal or sneak in to erase unseemly lines and blots, to retouch in color and shade and falsify the picture. The poor miserable autobiographer naturally desires to make his personality as interesting to the reader as it appears to himself. I feel this strongly in reading other men's recollections of their early years. There are, however, a few notable exceptions, the best one I know of being Serge Axikov's history of his childhood, and in his case the picture was not falsified, simply because the temper and tastes and passions of his early boyhood, his immense love of his mother, of nature, of all wilderness and of sport, endured unchanged in him to the end and kept him a boy in heart, able after long years to revive the past mentally and picture it in its true, fresh, original colors. And I say of myself with regard to this primitive faculty and emotion, this sense of the supernatural, unnatural things, as I have called it, that I am on safe ground for the same reason. The feeling has never been wholly outlived, and I will add, probably to the disgust of some rigidly orthodox reader, that these are childish things which I have no desire to put away. A few intimations of the feeling are beyond recall. I only know that my memory takes me back to a time when I was unconscious of any such element in nature, when the delight I experienced in all natural things was purely physical. I rejoiced in colors, scents, sounds, in taste, and touch, the blue of the sky, the verdure of earth, the sparkle of sunlight on water, the taste of milk, of fruit, of honey, the smell of dry or moist soil, of wind and rain, of herbs and flowers, the mere feel of a blade of grass made me happy, and there were certain sounds and perfumes, and above all certain colors in flowers, and in the plumage and eggs of birds, such as the purple polish shell of the Tinnamos egg which intoxicated me with delight. When riding on the plane I discovered a patch of scarlet verbenus in full bloom, and creeping plants covered an area of several yards, with a moist, green, suede sprinkled abundantly with the shining flower bosses. I would throw myself from my pony with a cry of joy to lie on the turf among them and feast my sight on their brilliant color. It was not, I think, until my eighth year that I began to be distinctly conscious of something more than this mere childish delight in nature. It may have been there all the time from infancy, I don't know, but when I began to know it consciously it was as if some hand had surreptitiously dropped something into the honeyed cup which gave it a certain, which gave it at certain times a new flavor. It gave me little thrills, often purely pleasurable, at other times startling, and there were occasions when it became so poignant as to frighten me. The sight of a magnificent sunset was sometimes almost more than I could endure, and made me wish to hide myself away. But when the feeling was roused by the sight of a small and beautiful or singular object such as a flower, its sole effect was to intensify the object's loveliness. There were many flowers which produced this effect but a slight degree, and as I grew up and the animalistic sense lost its intensity, these too lost their magic, and were almost like other flowers which had never had it. There were others which never lost what, for want of a better word, I have just called their magic, and of these I will give an account of one. I was about nine years old, perhaps a month or two more, when during one of my rambles on horseback I found at a distance of two or three miles from home a flower that was new to me. The plant a little over a foot in height was growing in the shelter of some large cardoon thistle, or wild artichoke bushes. It had three stocks closed with long, narrow, sharply pointed leaves, which were downy, soft to the feel like the leaves of our great mullion, and pale green in color. All three stems were covered with clusters of flowers. The single flower a little larger than that of the red valerian, of a pale red hue, and a particular shape, as each small pointed petal had a fold or twist at the end. All together it was slightly singular in appearance, and pretty, though not to be compared with scores of other flowers of the plains for beauty. Nevertheless it had an extraordinary fascination for me, and from the moment of its discovery it became one of my sacred flowers. From that time onward, when riding on the plain, I was always on the lookout for it, and as a rule I found three or four plants in a season, but never more than one at any spot. They were usually miles apart. On first discovering it I took a spray to show to my mother, and was strangely disappointed that she admired it merely because it was a pretty flower, seen for the first time. I had actually hoped to hear from her some word which would have it revealed to me why I thought so much of it. Now it appeared as if it were no more to her than any other pretty flower, and even less than some she was particularly fond of, such as the fragrant little lily called Virgin's Tears, the scented pure white and rose-coloured verbenas, and several others. Strange that she who alone seemed always to know what was in my mind, and who loved all beautiful things, especially flowers, should have failed to see what I found in it. Years later, when she had left us, and when I had grown almost to manhood, and we were living in another place, I found that we had as a neighbour a Belgian gentleman who was a botanist. I could not find a specimen of my plant to show him, but gave him a minute description of it as an annual, with very large, tough permanent roots, also that it exuded a thick milky juice when the stem was broken, and produced its yellow seeds in a long, cylindrical, sharply pointed pod full of bright silvery down, and I gave him sketches of flower and leaf. He succeeded in finding it in his books. The species had been known upwards of thirty years, and the discoverer, who happened to be an Englishman, had sent seed and roots to the botanical societies abroad he corresponded with. The species had been named after him, and it was to be found now growing in some of the botanical gardens of Europe. All this information was not enough to satisfy me. There was nothing about the man in his books, so I went to my father to ask him if he had ever known or heard of an Englishman of that name in the country. Yes, he said, he had known him well. He was a merchant in Buenos Aires. A nice, gentle-mannered man, a bachelor, and something of a recluse in his private house, where he lived alone, and spent all his weekends and holidays roaming about the plains with his vasculum in search of rare plants. He had been long dead, oh, quite twenty or twenty-five years. I was sorry that he was dead, and was haunted with a desire to find out his resting place so as to plant the flowers that bore his name on his grave. He surely, when he discovered it, must have had that feeling that I experienced when I first beheld it and could never describe, and perhaps the presence of those deep, ever-living roots near his bones and the flower in the sunshine above him would bring him a beautiful memory in a dream, if ever a dream visited him in his long, unwakening sleep. No doubt in the cases of this kind, when a first impression and the emotion accompanying it endures through life, the feeling changes somewhat with time. Imagination has worked on it and has had its effect. Nevertheless, the endurance of the image and emotion serves to show how powerful the mind was moved in the first instance. I related this case because there were interesting circumstances connected with it, but there were other flowers which produced a similar feeling, which, when recalled, bring back the original emotion, and I would gladly travel many miles any day to look again at any one of them. The feeling, however, was evoked more powerfully by trees than ever the most supernatural of my flowers. It varied in power according to the time and place and the appearance of the tree, or trees, and always affected me most on moonlit nights. Frequently after I had first begun to experience it consciously, I would go out of my way to meet it, and I used to steal out of the house alone when the moon was at its full to stand silent and motionless. Near some group of large trees, gazing at the dusky green foliage silvered by the beams, and at such times the sense of mystery would grow until a sensation of delight would change to fear and the fear increase until it was no longer to be born, and I would hastily escape to recover the sense of reality and safety indoors where there was light and company. Yet on the very next night I would steal out again and go to the spot where the effect was strongest, which was usually among the large, locused, or white Achesia trees, which gave the name of Las Achesias to our place. The loose feathery foliage on moonlight nights had a particular, hoary aspect that made this tree seem more intensely alive than others, more conscious of my presence and watchful of me. I never spoke of these feelings to others, not even to my mother, notwithstanding that she was always in perfect sympathy with me, with regard to my love of nature. The reason of my silence was, I think, my powerlessness to convey in words what I felt, but I imagine it would be correct to describe the sensation experienced on those moonlight nights among the trees as similar to the feeling a person would have if visited by a supernatural being, if he was perfectly convinced that it was there in his presence, albeit silent and unseen, intently regarding him and divining every thought in his mind. He would be thrilled to the marrow, but not terrified if he knew that it would take no visible shape nor speak to him out of the silence. The facility or instinct of the drawing mind is or has always seemed to me essentially character. Undoubtedly it is the root of all nature worship, from fetishism to the highest pantheistic development. It was more to me in those early days than all the religious teaching I received from my mother. Whatever she told me about our relation with the Supreme Being, I believed implicitly, just as I believed everything else she told me, and as I believed that two and two make four, and that the world is round in spite of its flat appearance, also that it is traveling through space and revolving round the sun instead of standing still with the sun going round it, as one would imagine. But apart from the fact that the powers above would save me in the end from extinction, which was a great consolation, these teachings did not touch my heart as it was touched and thrilled by something nearer, more intimate, in nature, not only in moonlit trees or in flower or serpent, but in certain exquisite moments and moods and in certain aspects of nature in every grass and in all things animate and inanimate. It is not my wish to create the impression that I am a peculiar person in this matter. On the contrary, it is my belief that the animistic instinct, if a mental faculty can be so called, exists and persists in many persons, and that I differ from others only in looking steadily at it and taking it for what it is, also in exhibiting it to the reader naked and without a fig leaf impressed to use a Bacconian phrase, when the religious calper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley Oak that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it for the happy fact that his mind was illuminated with the knowledge of the truth. He is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is, the sense of a supernatural in nature, and if they have grown up, as was the case with Calper, with the image of an implacable anthropomorphic deity in their minds, a being who is ever jealously watching them to note which way their wandering thoughts are tending, they rigorously repress the instinctive feeling as a temptation of the evil one, or as a lawless thought born of their own inherent sinfulness. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to meet with instances of persons who appear able to reconcile their faith in revealed religion with their animistic emotion. I will give an instance. One of the most treasured memories of an old lady friend of mine, recently deceased, was of her visits some sixty years or more ago to a great country-house where she met many of the distinguished people of that time, and of her host, who was then old, the head of an ancient and distinguished family, and of his reverential feeling for his trees. His greatest pleasure was to sit out of doors of an evening in sight of the grand old trees in his park, and before going in he would walk round to visit them one by one, and resting his hand on the park he would whisper a good night. He was convinced he invited it to his youngest guest, who often accompanied him in these evening walks, that they had intelligent souls, and knew and encouraged his devotion. There is nothing surprising to me in this. It is told here only because the one who cherished his feeling and belief was an Orthodox Christian, a profoundly religious person, also because my informant herself, who was also deeply religious, loved the memory of this old friend of her early life, mainly because of his feeling for trees, which she too cherished, believing, as she often told me, that trees and all living and growing things have souls. What has surprised me is that a form of tree worship is still found existing among a few of the inhabitants in some of the small rustic villages in out-of-the-world districts in England. Not such survivals as apple tree folk songs and ceremonies of the West, which have long become meaningless, but something living, which has a meaning for the mind, a survival, such as our anthropologists go to the end of the earth to seek among barbarous and savage tribes. The animism which persists in the adult in these scientific times has been so much acted on and changed by dry light that it is scarcely recognizable in what is somewhat loosely or vaguely called a feeling for nature. It has become intertwined with the aesthetic feeling and may be traced in a good deal of our poetic literature, particularly from the time of the first appearance of lyrical ballads which put an end to the eighteenth-century poetic convention and made the poet free to express what he really felt. But the feeling, whether expressed or not, was always there. Before the classical period we find in Traherne, a poetry which was distinctly animistic, with Christianity grafted onto it. Wordsworth's pantheism is a stabilized animism, but there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage, when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes. I must apologize to the reader for having gone beyond my last, since I am not a student of literature nor Catholic in my literary taste, and on such subjects can only say just what I feel. And this is that the survival of the sense of mystery or of the supernatural in nature is to me in our poetic literature, like that ingredient of a salad which animates the whole, that the absence of that emotion has made a great portion of the eighteenth-century poetic literature almost intolerable to me, so that I wish the little big man who dominated his age, and until a few months ago still had, in Mr. Courthrope, one follower among us, had emigrated west when still young, leaving Windsor Forest as his only monument and sole and sufficient title to immortality.