His Ugly Grotesque Neighbour Of The Piebald Horses Was
More Like One.
I described the people that lived nearest to us, our
next-door neighbours so to speak, because I knew them from childhood
and followed their fortunes when I grew up, and was thus able to give
their complete history.
The patriarchs, the grand old gaucho
estancieros, I came to know, were scattered all over the land, but,
with one exception, I did not know them intimately from childhood, and
though I could fill this chapter with their portraits I prefer to give
it all to the one I knew best, Don Evaristo Penalva, a very fine
patriarch indeed.
I cannot now remember when I first made his acquaintance, but I was
not quite six, though very near it, when I had my first view of his,
house. In the chapter on "Some Early Bird Adventures," I have
described my first long walk on the plains, when two of my brothers
took me to a river some distance from home, where I was enchanted with
my first sight of that glorious waterfowl, the flamingo. Now, as we
stood on the brink of the flowing water, which had a width of about
two hundred yards at that spot when the river had overflowed its
banks, one of my elder brothers pointed to a long low house, thatched
with rushes, about three-quarters of a mile distant on the other side
of the stream, and informed me that it was the estancia house of Don
Evaristo Penalva, who was one of the principal landowners in that
part.
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