BOYHOOD'S END
The book - The Saledero, 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 life - A boy's mind - A
brother's resolution - End of our thousand and one nights - A reading
spell - My boyhood ends in disaster.
This book has already run to a greater length than was intended;
nevertheless there must be yet another chapter or two to bring it to a
proper ending, which I can only find by skipping over three years of
my life, and so getting at once to the age of fifteen. For that was a
time of great events and serious changes, bodily and mental, which
practically brought the happy time of my boyhood to an end.
On looking back over the book, I find that on three or four occasions
I have placed some incident in the wrong chapter or group, thus making
it take place a year or so too soon or too late. These small errors of
memory are, however, not worth altering now: so long as the scene or
event is rightly remembered and pictured it doesn't matter much
whether I was six or seven, or eight years old at the time. I find,
too, that I have omitted many things which perhaps deserved a place in
the book - scenes and events which are vividly remembered, but which
unfortunately did not come up at the right moment, and so were left
out.
Of these scenes unconsciously omitted, I will now give one which
should have appeared in the chapter describing my first visit to
Buenos Ayres city: placed here it will serve very well as an
introduction to this last chapter.
In those days, and indeed down to the seventies of last century, the
south side of the capital was the site of the famous Saladero, or
killing-grounds, where the fat cattle, horses and sheep brought in
from all over the country were slaughtered every day, some to supply
the town with beef and mutton and to make _charque,_ or sun-dried
beef, for exportation to Brazil, where it was used to feed the slaves,
but the greater number of the animals, including all the horses, were
killed solely for their hides and tallow. The grounds covered a space
of three or four square miles, where there were cattle enclosures made
of upright posts placed close together, and some low buildings
scattered about To this spot were driven endless flocks of sheep, half
or wholly wild horses and dangerous-looking, long-horned cattle in
herds of a hundred or so to a thousand, each moving in its cloud of
dust, with noise of bellowings and bleatings and furious shouting of
the drovers as they galloped up and down, urging the doomed animals
on.
