We Were, He Told Us, Grossly Ignorant - Simply Young Barbarians;
But He Had Penetrated Beneath The Thick Crust That Covered
Our minds,
and was pleased to find that there were possibilities of better
things; that if we would but second
His efforts and throw ourselves,
heart and soul, into our studies, we should eventually develop from
the grub condition to that of purple-winged butterflies.
Our new teacher was tremendously eloquent, and it looked as if he had
succeeded in conquering that wildness or weakness or whatever it was
which had been his undoing in the past. Then came a time when he would
ask for a horse and go for a long ride. He would make a call at some
English estancia, and drink freely of the wine or spirits hospitably
set on the table. And the result would be that he would come home
raving like a lunatic: - a very little alcohol would drive him mad.
Then would follow a day or two of repentance and black melancholy;
then recovery and a fresh fair start.
All this was somewhat upsetting to all of us: to my mother it was
peculiarly distressing, and became more so when, in one of his
repentant fits and touched by her words, he gave her a packet of his
mother's letters to read: - the pathetic letters of a broken-hearted
woman to her son, her only and adored child, lost to her for ever in a
distant country, thousands of miles from home. These sad appeals only
made my mother more anxious to save him, and it was no doubt her
influence that for a while did save and make him able to succeed in
his efforts to overcome his fatal weakness. But he was of too sanguine
a temper, and by and by began to think that he had conquered, that he
was safe, that it was time for him to do something great; and with
some brilliant scheme he had hatched in his mind, he left us and went
back to the capital to work it out. But alas! before many months, when
he was getting seriously to work, with friends and money to help him
and every prospect of success, he broke down once more, so hopelessly
that once more he had to be got rid of, and he was sent out of the
country, but whether back to his own people or to some other remote
district in Argentina I do not remember, nor do I know what became of
him.
Thus disastrously ended the third and last attempt my father made to
have us instructed at home. Nor could he send us to town, where there
was but one English school for boys, run by a weak, sickly gentleman,
whose house was a nest of fevers and every sort of ailment incidental
to boys herded together in an unhealthy boarding-school. Prosperous
English people sent their children home to be educated at that time,
but it was enormously expensive and we were not well off enough.
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