Far Away and Long Ago | Page 2

defeated army--Demands for fresh
horses-- In peril--My father's shining defects--His pleasure in a
thunderstorm --A childlike trust in his fellow-men--Soldiers turn upon
their officer--A refugee given up and murdered--Our Alcalde again--On

cutting throats--Ferocity and cynicism--Native blood-lust and its effects
on a boy's mind--Feeling about Rosas--A bird poem or tale-- Vain
search for lost poem and story of its authorship--The Dictator's
daughter--Time, the old god

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

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

CHAPTER XI
A BREEDER OF PIEBALDS
La Tapera, a native estancia--Don Gregorio Gandara--His grotesque
appearance and strange laugh--Gandara's wife and her habits and pets--
My dislike of hairless dogs--Gandara's daughters--A pet ostrich--In the
peach orchard--Gandara's herds of piebald brood mares--His masterful

temper--His own saddle-horses--Creating a sensation at gaucho
gatherings--The younger daughter's lovers--Her marriage at our
house--The priest and the wedding breakfast--Demetria forsaken by her
husband

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

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

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

nesting-place--Great owl visitations

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVIII

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

CHAPTER XIX
BROTHERS
Our third and last schoolmaster--His many accomplishments--His
weakness and final breakdown--My important brother--Four brothers,
unlike in everything except the voice--A strange meeting--Jack the
Killer, his life and character--A terrible fight--My brother seeks
instructions from Jack--The gaucho's way of