Far away and long ago, a history of my early life

Front matter

CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Gi// of

Herbert Fisk Johnson '22

Chapter I

Preamble — ^The house where I was born — The singular ombii 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 .

Chapter II

We quit our old home — A winter day journey — Aspect of the country — Our new home — ^A prisoner in the barn — The plantation — ^A paradise of rats — ^An evening scene^The people of the house — A beggar on horseback — Mr. Trigg our schoolmaster — His double nature — Impersonates an old woman — Reading Dickens — Mr. Trigg degenerates — Once more a homeless wanderer on the great plain . . . 17

Chapter III

The old dog Caesar — His powerful personality — Last days and end — The old dog's burial — The fact of death is brought home to me — A child's mental anguish — My mother comforts me — Limitations of the child's mind — Fear of death — Witnessing the slaughter of cattle — A man in the moat — Margarita, the nursery-maid — Her beauty and lovableness — Her death — I refuse to see her dead .... 32 vi CONTENTS

Chapter IV The Plantation Paoe

Living with, trees — Winter violets — The house is made habitable — Red wiUow — Scizzor-tail and carrion-hawk — Lombardy poplars — Black acacia — Other trees — The fosse or moat — Rats — ^A trial of strength with an armadillo — Opossums living with a snake — ^Alfalfa field and butterflies — Cane brake — Weeds and fennel — Peach trees in blossom — Paroquets — Singing of a field finch — Concert-singing in birds — Old John . — Cow-birds' singing — Arrival of summer migrants . . ' 45

Chapter V

Appearance of a green level land — Cardoon and giant thistles — Villages of the vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent — Groves and plantations seen like islands on the wide level plains — Trees planted by the early colonists — Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral people — Houses as part of the landscape — Flesh diet of the gauchos — Summer change in the aspect of the plain — The water-like mirage — The giant thistle and a " thistle year " — Fear of fires — ^An incident at a fire — The pamfero, or south-west wind, and the fall of the , thistles — Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals — A great pampero storm — Big hailstones — Damage caused by hail — Zango, an old horse, killed — Zango and his master . 63

Chapter VI

Visit to a river on the pampas — ^A first long walk — Water-fowl — My first sight of flamingoes — A great dove visitation — Strange tameness of the birds — Vain attempts at putting salt on their tails — ^An ethical question : When is a lie not a lie ? — The carancho, a vulture-eagle — Our pair of caranchos — Their nest in a peach tree — I am ambitious to take their

eggs — The birds' crimes — I am driven off by the birds

The nest pulled down ••••... 77

CONTENTS vii

CHAPTER VII MY FIRST VISIT TO BUENOS AYRES ,aob

Happiest time — First visit to the capital — Old and New Buenos Ayres — ^Vivid impressions — Solitary walk — How I learnt to go alone — Lost — The house we stayed at and the sea-like river — Rough and narrow streets — Rows of posts — Carts and noise— A great church festival — ^Young men in black and scarlet — River scenes — Washerwomen and their language — Their word-fights with young fashionables — ^Night watch- 'men — A young gentleman's pastime — ^A fishing dog — ^A fine gentleman seen stoning little birds — A glimpse of Don Eusebio, the Dictator's fool ...... 92

CHAPTER VIII THE tyrant's fall AND WHAT FOLLOWED

The portraits in our dravdng-room — ^The Dictator Rosas who was like an Englishman — ^The strange face of his vsdfe, Encarnacion — ^The traitor Urquiza — The Minister of War, his peacocks and his son — ^Home again from the city — The war deprives us of our playmate — Natalia, our shepherd's wife — Her son, Medardo — ^The Alcalde, our grand old man — Battle of Monte Caseros — ^The 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 . 107

Chapter IX Our Neighbours At The Poplars

Homes on the great green plain — Making the acquainj:ance 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 Ombii — A feast — Barboza vm CONTENTS

PAQI 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 . 132

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 Enghsh sheep-farmer — Making sheep's-milk cheeses under difficulties — Mr. Royd'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 . . . . . . . 147

Chapter XI

La Tapera, a native estancia — Don Gregorio Gandara — ^His grotesque appearance and strange laugh — Gandara's wdfe and her habits and pets — My dislike of hairless dogs — Gandara's daughters — rA 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 . , . . . • 'S^

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 mocachina — 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

CONTENTS ix

Winter — ITie venomous toad-like Ceratophrys— Vocal performance of the toad-like creapire — We make war on them —The great lake bdttle and its results . . . .167

Chapter XIII

The grand old man of the plains — Don Evaristo Pefialva, 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 . . . . . . i8o

Chapter XIV

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 190

Chapter XV

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 ....... 205

Chapter XVI

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-rWatching a bat — The black serpent reappears at my feet — Emotions and conjectures — Melanism — My baby sister and a strange snake — The mystery solved . . . . . . .214

X CONTENTS

Chapter XVII

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 224

CHAPTER XVin

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 fo'r 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 ........ 236

Chapter XIX

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 KUler, his life and character — A terrible fight — My brother seeks instructions from Jack — The gaucho's way of 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 . 247

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER XX BIRDING IN THE MARSHES ,j^og

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 duras-* millo — ^The trupial's nest and eggs — Recalling a beauty that has vanished — Our games with gauche^ 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 ...... 260

Chapter XXI

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 dilcking 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 . 271

CHAPTER XXn 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 Efe — ^A boy's mind — ^A brother's resolution — End of our thousand and one nights — ^A reading spell — ^My boyhood ends in disaster . -, . . 285 xii CONTENTS

Chapter XXIII

A severe illiiess — 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 .... 301"

Chapter XXIV

The soul's loneliness — My mother and her death — ^A mother's love for h«r 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 Danvin's works — ^A new philosophy of life — Conclusion . jii

CHAPTER I Earliest Memories

Preamble — The house where I was born — The singular ombii 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 h^ve 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^n 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 imagitie 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 1 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 frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the beginning, it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible. Over it all my eyes could range at will, choosing this or that point to dwell upon, to examine it in all its details ; or in the case of some person known ^o me as a child, to follow his life till it ended or passed from sight; then to return to the same point again to repeat the process with other lives and resume my rambles in the old familiar haunts.

What a happiness it would be, I thought, in spite of discomfort and pain and danger, if this vision would continue ! It was not to be expected : nevertheless it did not vanish, and on the second day I set myself to try and save it from the oblivion which would presently cover it again. Propped up with pillows I began with pencil and writing-pad to put it down in some sort of order, and went on with it at intervals during the whole six weeks of my confinement, and in this way produced the first rough draft of the book.

And all this time I never ceased wondering at my own mental state ; I thought of it when, quickly tired, my trembling fingers dropped the pencil ; or when I woke from uneasy sleep to find the vision still before me, inviting, insistently calling to me, to resume my childish rambles and adventures of long ago in that strange world where I first saw the light.

It was to me a marvellous experience ; to be here, propped up with pillows in a dimly-lighted room, the night-nurse idly dozing by the fire ; the sound of the everlasting wind in my ears, howling outside and dashing the rain like hailstones against the windowpanes ; to be awake to all this, feverish and ill and sore, conscious of my danger too, and at the same time to be thousands of miles away, out in the sun and wind, rejoicing in other sights and sounds, happy again with that ancient long-lost and now recovered happiness !

During the three years that have passed since I had that strange experience, I have from time to time, when in the mood, gone back to the book and have had to cut it down a good deal and to reshape it, as in the first draft it would have made too long and formless a history.

The house where I was born, on the South American pampas, was quaintly named Los Veinte-cinco Ombues, which means " The Twenty-five Ombu Trees," there being just twenty-five of these indigenous trees — gigantic in size, and standing wide apart in a row about 400 yards long. The ombu is a very singular tree indeed, and being the only representative of treevegetation, natural to the soil, on those great level plains, and having a,lso many curious superstitions connected with it, it is a romance in itself. It belongs to the rare Phytolacca family, and has an immense girth — forty or fifty feet in some cases ; at the same time the wood is so soft and spongy that it can be cut into with a knife, and is utterly unfit for firewood, for when cut up it refuses to dry, but simply rots away like a ripe water-melon. It also grows slowly, and its leaves, which are large, glossy and deep green, like laurel leaves, are poisonous ; and because of its uselessness it will probably become extinct, like the graceful pampas grass in the same region. In this exceedingly practical age men quickly lay the axe at the root of things which, in their view, only cumber the ground ; but before other trees had been planted the antiquated and grand-looking ombu had its uses ; it served as a gigantic landmark to the traveller on the great monotonous plains, and also afforded refreshing shade to man and horse in summer ; while the native doctor or herbalist would sometimes pluck a leaf for a patient requiring a very violent remedy for his disorder. Our trees were about a century old and very large, and, as they stood on an elevation, they could be easily seen at a distance of ten miles. At noon in summer the cattle and sheep, of which we had a large number, used to rest in their shade ; one large tree also afforded us children a splendid play-house, and we used to carry up a number of planks to construct safe bridges from branch to branch, and at noon, when our elders were sleeping their siesta, we would have our arboreal games unmolested.

Besides the famous twenty-five, there was one other tree of a different species, growing close to the house, and this was known all over the neighbourhood as " The Tree," this proud name having been bestowed on it because it was the only one of the kind known in that part of the country ; our native neighbours always affirmed that it was the only one in the world. It was a fine large old tree, with a white bark, long smooth white thorns, and dark-green undeciduous foliage. Its blossoming time was in November — a month about as hot as an English July — and it would then become covered with tassels of minute wax-like flowers, pale straw-colour, and of a wonderful fragrance, which the soft summer wind would carry for miles on its wings. And in this way our neighbours would discover that the flowering season had come to the tree they so much admired, and they would come to beg for a branch to take home with them to perfume their lowly houses. \

The pampas are, in most places, level as a billiardtable ; just where we lived, however, the country happened to be undulating, and our house stood on the summit of one of the highest elevations. Before the house stretched a great grassy plain, level to the horizon, while at the back it sloped abruptly down to a broad, deep stream, which emptied itself in the river Plata, about six miles to the east. This stream, with its three ancient red willow trees growing on the banks, was a source of endless pleasure to us. Whenever we went down to play on the banks, the fresh penetrating scent of the moist earth had a strangely exhilarating effect, making us wild with joy. I am able now to recall these sensations, and believe that the sense of. smell, which seems to diminish as we grow older, until it becomes something scarcely worthy of being called a sense, is nearly as keen in little children as in the inferior animals, and, when they live \^ith nature, contributes as much to their pleasure as sight or hearing. I havie often observed that small children, when brought on to low, moist ground from a high level, give loose to a sudden spontaneous gladness,, running, shouting, and rolling over the grass just like dogs, and I have no doubt that the fresh smell of the earth is the cause of their joyous excitement.

Our house was a long low structure, built of brick, and, being very old, naturally had the reputation of being haunted. A former proprietor, half a century before I was born, once had among his slaves a very handsome young negro, who, on account of his beauty and amiability, was a special favourite with his mistress. Her preference filled his poor silly brains with dreams and aspirations, and, deceived by her gracious manner, he one day ventured to approach her in the absence of his master and told her his feelings. She could not forgive so terrible an insult to her pride, and when her husband returned went to him, white with indignation, and told him how this miserable slave had abused their kindness. The husband had an implacable heart, and at his command the offender was suspended by the wrists to a low, horizontal branch of "The Tree," and there, in sight of his master and mistress, he was scourged to death by his fellow-slaves. His battered body was then taken down and buried in a deep hollow at some little distance from the last of the long row of ombu trees. It was the ghost of this poor black, whose punishment had been so much heavier than his offence deserved, that was supposed to haunt the place. It was not, however, a conventional ghost, stalking about in a white sheet ; th^se who had seen it averred that it invariably rose up from the spot where the body had been buried, like a pale, luminous exhalation from the earth, and, assuming a human shape, floated slowly towards the house, and roamed about the great trees, or, seating itself on an old projecting root, would remain motionless for hours in a dejected attitude. I never saw it.

Our constant companion and playmate in those days, was a dog, whose portrait has never faded from remembrance, for he was a dog with features and a personality which impressed themselves deeply on the mind. He came to us in a rather mysterious manner. One summer evening the shepherd was galloping round the flock, and trying by means of much shouting to induce the lazy sheep to move homewards. A strange-looking lame dog suddenly appeared on the scene, as if it had dropped from the clouds, and limping briskly after the astonished ajid frightened sheep, drove them straight home and into the fold ; and, after thus earning his supper and showing what stuff was in him, he established himself at the house, where he was well received. He was a good-sized animal, with a very long body, a smooth black coat, tan feet, muzzle, and "spectacles," and a face of extraordinary length, which gave him a

\ prof oundly-wise baboon-like expression. One of his hind legs had been broken or otherwise injured, so that he limped and shuffled along in a peculiar lopsided fashion ; he had no tail, and his ears had been cropped close to his head : altogether he was like an old soldier returned from the wars, where he had received many hard knocks, besides having had sundry portions of his anatomy shot away. "

No name to fit this- singular canine visitor coujld be found, although he respo/ided readily enough tb the word pechicho, which is used to call any unnamed pup by, like pussy for a cat. So it came to pass that this word pechicho — equivalent to " doggie " in English — stuck to him for only name until the end of the chapter ; and the end was that, after spending some years with us, he mysteriously disappeared.

He "very soon proved to us that he understood children as well as sheep ; at all events he would allow them to tease and pull him about most unmercifully, and actually appeared to enjoy it. Our first ridinglessons were taken on his back ; but old Pechicho eventually made one mistake, after which he was relieved from the labour of carrying us. When I was about four years old, my two elder brothers, iu the character of riding-masters, set me on his back, and, in order to test my capacity for sticking on under difficulties, they rushed away, calling him. The old dog, infected with the pretended excitement, bounded after them, and I was thrown and had my leg broken, for, as the poet says —

Children, they are very little, And their bones are very brittle.

lo FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO

Luckily their little brittle bones quickly solder, and it did not take me long to recover from the effects of this mishap.

No doubt my canine steed was as much troubled as any one at the accident. I seem to see the wise old fellow nowj sitting in that curious one-sided fashion ' he had acquired so as to rest his lame leg, his mouth opened to a kind of immense smile, and his brown benevolent eyes regarding us with just such an expression as one sees in a faithful old negress nursing a flock of troublesome white children — so proud and happy to be in charge of the little ones of a superior race !