Thus, Consistent To The End, And With His Secret Untold To Any Sympathetic Human Soul, Perished Poor Old Con-Stair Lo-Vair, The Strangest Of All Strange Beings I Have Met With In My Journey Through Life.

CHAPTER II

MY NEW HOME

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.

The incidents and impressions recorded in the preceding chapter relate, as I have said, to the last year or two of my five years of life in the place of my birth. Further back my memory refuses to take me. Some wonderful persons go back to their second or even their first year; I can't, and could only tell from hearsay what I was and did up to the age of three. According to all accounts, the clouds of glory I brought into the world - a habit of smiling at everything I looked at and at every person that approached me - ceased to be visibly trailed at about that age; I only remember myself as a common little boy - just a little wild animal running about on its hind legs, amazingly interested in the world in which it found itself.

Here, then, I begin, aged five, at an early hour on a bright, cold morning in June - midwinter in that southern country of great plains or pampas; impatiently waiting for the loading and harnessing to be finished; then the being lifted to the top with the other little ones - at that time we were five; finally, the grand moment when the start was actually made with cries and much noise of stamping and snorting of horses and rattling of chains. I remember a good deal of that long journey, which began at sunrise and ended between the lights some time after sunset; for it was my very first, and I was going out into the unknown. I remember how, at the foot of the slope at the top of which the old home stood, we plunged into the river, and there was more noise and shouting and excitement until the straining animals brought us safely out on the other side. Gazing back, the low roof of the house was lost to view before long, but the trees - the row of twenty- five giant ombu-trees which gave the place its name - were visible, blue in the distance, until we were many miles on our way.

The undulating country had been left behind; before us and on both sides the land, far as one could see, was absolutely flat, everywhere green with the winter grass, but flowerless at that season, and with the gleam of water, over the whole expanse. It had been a season of great rains, and much of the flat country had been turned into shallow lakes.

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