Far Away and Long Ago | Page 3

fighting and Jack's
contrasted--Our sham fight with knives--A wound and the result--My
feeling about Jack and his eyes--Bird-lore--My two elder brothers'
practical joke

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

CHAPTER XXI
WILD-FOWLING ADVENTURES
My sporting brother and the armoury--I attend him on his shooting

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER I

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

It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to
writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some
incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in
_The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds,_
and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this material
would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book as this.
When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not write a
history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I had
already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I really
believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his early life
in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like one who ascends a
hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of heavy cloud and
shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there, some feature in
the landscape--hill or wood or tower or spire--touched and made
conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity.
The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not
present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence or regular
progression--nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly
illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental
landscape.
It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus distinctly
remembered and visualized are precisely those which were most
important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory while
all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed how our
memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's life--at all
events of some lives--in some rare state of the mind, it is all at once
revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever blotted out.
It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I had a

wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was
tempted--forced I may say--to write this account of my early years. I
will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a
psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in
anything else contained in the book.
I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one
November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the bright
colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an east wind
in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up for six weeks
with a very serious