My sporting brother and the armoury - I attend him on his shooting
expeditions - Adventure with golden plover - A morning after wild duck -
Our punishment - I learn to shoot - My first gun - My first wild duck - My
ducking tactics - My gun's infirmities - Duck-shooting with a
blunderbuss - Ammunition runs out - An adventure with rosy-bill duck -
Coarse gunpowder and home-made shot - The war danger comes our way - We
prepare to defend the house - The danger over and my brother leaves
home
CHAPTER XXII
BOYHOOD'S END
The book - The Saladero, 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
CHAPTER XXIII
A DARKENED LIFE
A severe illness - Case pronounced hopeless - How it affected me -
Religious doubts and a mind distressed - Lawless thoughts - Conversation
with an old gaucho about religion - George Combe and the desire for
immortality
CHAPTER XXIV
LOSS AND GAIN
The soul's loneliness - My mother and her death - A mother's love for
her son - Her character - Anecdotes - A mystery and a revelation - The
autumnal migration of birds - Moonlight vigils - My absent brother's
return - He introduces me to Darwin's works - A new philosophy of life -
Conclusion
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST MEMORIES
Preamble - The house where I was born - The singular Ombu tree - A tree
without a name - The plain - The ghost of a murdered slave - Our
playmate, the old sheep-dog - A first riding-lesson - The cattle: an
evening scene - My mother - Captain Scott - The hermit and his awful
penance.
It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to
writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some
incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in
_The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds,_
and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this
material would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book
as this. When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not
write a history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I
had already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I
really believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his
early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like
one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of
heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there,
some feature in the landscape - hill or wood or tower or spire - touched
and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in
obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call
up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence
or regular progression - nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or
patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide
shrouded mental landscape.
It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus
distinctly remembered and visualized are precisely those which were
most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory
while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed
how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's
life - at all events of some lives - in some rare state of the mind, it
is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever
blotted out.
It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I
had a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was
tempted - forced I may say - to write this account of my early years. I
will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a
psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in
anything else contained in the book.
I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one
November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the
bright colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an
east wind in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up
for six weeks with a very serious illness. Yet when it was over I
looked back on those six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so
little of physical pain. Never had I felt confinement less - I who
feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of
sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly
alive!
On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative
ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had
that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously
had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons,
when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some
flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and
so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely
emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was
different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the beginning,
it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire
wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible. Over it all my eyes
could range at will, choosing this or that point to dwell on, to
examine it in all its details; and, in the case of some person known
to me as a child, to follow his life till it ended or passed from
sight; then to return to the same point again to repeat the process
with other lives and resume my rambles in the old familiar haunts.
