Far Away and Long Ago | Page 3

game of hunting the ostrich

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

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

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

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

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

It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in _The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds,_ and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this material would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book as this. When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not write a history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I had already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I really believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there, some feature in the landscape--hill or wood or tower or spire--touched and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence or regular progression--nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape.
It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus distinctly remembered and visualized are precisely those which were most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's life--at all events of some lives--in some rare state of the mind, it is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever blotted out.
It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I had a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was tempted--forced I may say--to write this account of my early years. I will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in anything else contained in the book.
I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the bright colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an east wind in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up for six weeks with a very serious illness. Yet when it was over I looked back on those six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so little of physical pain. Never had I felt confinement less--I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!
On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more