Many as three or four - would be seen to rise at various
points and distances, and one had to mark and keep in memory the exact
spots to visit them successively and find the nests. The English
method of going out and quartering the ground in search of a nest in
likely places where the birds breed was too slow for us.
The nests I found that morning contained one or two and sometimes
three eggs - very rarely the full clutch of four. Before midday I had
got back with a bag of sixty-four eggs; and that was the largest
number I ever gathered at one time.
Our dinner consisted of meat and pumpkin, boiled or baked, maize "in
the milk" in its season and sweet potatoes, besides the other common
vegetables and salads. Maize-meal puddings and pumpkin pies and tarts
were common with us, but the sweet we loved best was a peach-pie, made
like an apple-pie with a crust, and these came in about the middle of
February and lasted until April or even May, when our late variety,
which we called "winter peach," ripened.
My mother was a clever and thrifty housekeeper, and I think she made
more of the peach than any other resident in the country who possessed
an orchard. Her peach preserves, which lasted us the year round, were
celebrated in our neighbourhood. Peach preserves were in most English
houses, but our house was alone in making pickled peaches: I think
this was an invention of her own; I do not know if it has taken on,
but we always had pickled peaches on the table and preferred them to
all other kinds, and so did every person who tasted them.
I here recall an amusing incident with regard to our pickled peaches,
and will relate it just because it serves to bring in yet another of
our old native neighbours. I never thought of him when describing the
others, as he was not so near us and we saw little of him and his
people. His name was Bentura Gutierres, and he called himself an
estanciero - a landowner and head of a cattle establishment; but there
was very little land left and practically no cattle - only a few cows,
a few sheep, a few horses. His estate had been long crumbling away and
there was hardly anything left; but he was a brave spirit and had a
genial, breezy manner, and dressed well in the European mode, with
trousers and coat and waistcoat - this last garment being of satin and
a very bright blue. And he talked incessantly of his possessions: his
house, his trees, his animals, his wife and daughters.
