A Traveller in Little Things | Page 5

are like those two of Elaboration and
Degeneration which go on side by side for ever in nature, in the animal
world; and like darkness and light and heat and cold in the physical
world.
As a fact, the country is full of the descendants of families that have
"died out." How long it takes to blot out or blur the finer features and
expression we do not know, and the time probably varies according to
the length of the period during which the family existed in its higher
phase. The question which confronts us is: Does the higher or better
nature, the "inward perfections" which are correlated with the aspects
which please, endure too, or do those who fall from their own class
degenerate morally to the level of the people they live and are one
with?
It is a nice question. In Sussex, with Mr. M. A. Lower, who has written
about the vanished or submerged families of that county, for my guide
as to names, I have sought out persons of a very humble condition,
some who were shepherds and agricultural labourers, and have been

surprised at the good faces of many of them, the fine, even noble,
features and expression, and with these an exceptionally fine character.
Labourers on the lands that were once owned by their forefathers, and
children of long generations of labourers, yet still exhibiting the marks
of their aristocratic descent, the fine features and expression and the
fine moral qualities with which they are correlated.
I will now give in illustration an old South American experience, an
example, which deeply impressed me at the time, of the sharp contrast
between a remote descendant of aristocrats and a child of the people in
a country where class distinctions have long ceased to exist.
It happened that I went to stay at a cattle ranch for two or three months
one summer, in a part of the country new to me, where I knew scarcely
anyone. It was a good spot for my purpose, which was bird study, and
this wholly occupied my mind. By-and-by I heard about two brothers,
aged respectively twenty-three and twenty-four years, who lived in the
neighbourhood on a cattle ranch inherited from their father, who had
died young. They had no relations and were the last of their name in
that part of the country, and their grazing land was but a remnant of the
estate as it had been a century before. The name of the brothers first
attracted my attention, for it was that of an old highly-distinguished
family of Spain, two or three of whose adventurous sons had gone to
South America early in the seventeenth century to seek their fortunes,
and had settled there. The real name need not be stated: I will call it de
la Rosa, which will serve as well as another. Knowing something of the
ancient history of the family I became curious to meet the brothers, just
to see what sort of men they were who had blue blood and yet lived, as
their forbears had done for generations, in the rough primitive manner
of the gauchos--the cattle-tending horsemen of the pampas. A little later
I met the younger brother at a house in the village a few miles from the
ranch I was staying at. His name was Cyril; the elder was Ambrose. He
was certainly a very fine fellow in appearance, tall and strongly built,
with a high colour on his open genial countenance and a smile always
playing about the corners of his rather large sensual mouth and in his
greenish-hazel eyes; but of the noble ancestry there was no faintest
trace. His features were those of the unameliorated peasant, as he may

be seen in any European country, and in this country, in Ireland
particularly, but with us he is not so common. It would seem that in
England there is a larger mixture of better blood, or that the
improvements in features due to improved conditions, physical and
moral, have gone further. At all events, one may look at a crowd
anywhere in England and see only a face here and there of the
unmodified plebeian type. In a very large majority the forehead will be
less low and narrow, the nose less coarse with less wide-spreading alae,
the depression in the bridge not so deep, the mouth not so large nor the
jowl so heavy. These marks of the unimproved adult are present in all
infants at birth. Lady Clara Vere de Vere's little bantling is in a sense
not hers at all but the child of some ugly antique race; of a Palaeolithic
mother, let us say, who lived before the last Glacial epoch and was not
very much better- looking herself than an orang-utan.