William Henry Hudson
Birth & Early Years
Chapter summaries from 'Far Away and Long Ago', published 1918 by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
CHAPTER I: EARLIEST MEMORIES
Preamble—The house where I was born—The singular ombú 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
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
CHAPTER III: DEATH OF AN OLD DOG
The old dog Cæsar—His powerful personality—Last days and end—The old dog’s burial—The fact of death is brought home to me—A child’s mental anguish—My mother comforts me—Limitations of the child’s mind—Fear of death—Witnessing the slaughter of cattle—A man in the moat—Margarita, the nursery-maid—Her beauty and lovableness— Her death—I refuse to see her dead
CHAPTER IV: THE PLANTATION
Living with trees—Winter violets—The house is made habitable—Red willow—Scizzor–tail and carrion–hawk—Lombardy poplars—Black acacia—Other trees—The fosse or moat—Rats—A trial of strength with an armadillo—Opossums living with a snake—Alfalfa field and butterflies—Cane brake—Weeds and fennel—Peach trees in blossom—Paroquets—Singing of a field finch—Concert-singing in birds—Old John—Cow-birds’ singing—Arrival of summer migrants
CHAPTER V: ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN
Appearance of a green level land—Cardoon and giant thistles—Villages of the vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent—Groves and plantations seen like islands on the wide level plains—Trees planted by the early colonists—Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral people—Houses as part of the landscape—Flesh diet of the gauchos—Summer change in the aspect of the plain—The water-like mirage—The giant thistle and a “thistle year”—Fear of fires—An incident at a fire—The pampero, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles—Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals—A great pampero storm—Big hailstones—Damage caused by hail—Zango, an old horse, killed—Zango and his master
CHAPTER VI: SOME BIRD ADVENTURES
Visit to a river on the pampas—A first long walk—Water-fowl—My first sight of flamingoes—A great dove visitation—Strange tameness of the birds—Vain attempts at putting salt on their tails—An ethical question: When is a lie not a lie?—The carancho, a vulture-eagle—Our pair of caranchos—Their nest in a peach tree—I am ambitious to take their eggs—The birds’ crimes—I am driven off by the birds—The nest pulled down
CHAPTER VII: MY FIRST VISIT TO BUENOS AYRES
Happiest time—First visit to the capital—Old and New Buenos Ayres—Vivid impressions—Solitary walk—How I learnt to go alone—Lost—The house we staved at and the sea-like river—Rough and narrow streets—Rows of posts—Carts and noise—A great church festival—Young men in black and scarlet—River scenes—Washerwomen and their language—Their word-fights with young fashionables—Night watchmen—A young gentleman’s pastime—A fishing dog—A fine gentleman seen stoning little birds—A glimpse of Don Eusebio, the Dictator’s fool
CHAPTER VIII: THE TYRANT’S FALL AND WHAT FOLLOWED
The portraits in our drawing-room—The Dictator Rosas who was like an Englishman—The strange face of his wife, Encarnacion—The traitor Urquiza—The Minister of War, his peacocks and his son—Home again from the city—The war deprives us of our playmate—Natalia, our shepherd’s wife—Her son, Medardo—The Alcalde, our grand old man—Battle of Monte Caseros—The defeated army—Demands for fresh horses—In peril—My father’s shining defects—His pleasure in a thunderstorm—A childlike trust in his fellow-men—Soldiers turn upon their officer—A refugee given up and murdered—Our Alcalde again—On cutting throats—Ferocity and cynicism—Native blood-lust and its effects on a boy’s mind—Feeling about Rosas—A bird poem or tale—Vain search for lost poem and story of its authorship—The Dictator’s daughter—Time, the old god
CHAPTER IX: OUR NEIGHBOURS AT THE POPLARS
Homes on the great green plain—Making the acquaintance of our neighbours—The attraction of birds—Los Alamos and the old lady of the house—Her treatment of St. Anthony—The strange Barboza family—The man of blood—Great fighters—Barboza as a singer—A great quarrel but no fight—A cattle-marking—Dona Lucia del Ombú—A feast—Barboza sings and is insulted by El Rengo—Refuses to fight—The two kinds of fighters—A poor little angel on horseback—My feeling for Anjelita—Boys unable to express sympathy—A quarrel with a friend—Enduring image of a little girl
CHAPTER X: OUR NEAREST ENGLISH NEIGHBOUR
Casa Antigua, our nearest English neighbour’s house—Old Lombardy poplars—Cardoon thistle or wild artichoke—Mr. Royd, an English sheep-farmer—Making sheep’s-milk cheeses under difficulties—Mr. Royd’s native wife—The negro servants—The two daughters: a striking contrast—The white blue-eyed child and her dusky playmate—A happy family—Our visits to Casa Antigua—Gorgeous dinners—Estanislao and his love of wild life—The Royds’ return visit—A homemade carriage—The gaucho’s primitive conveyance—The happy home broken up
CHAPTER XI: A BREEDER OF PIEBALDS
La Tapera, a native estancia—Don Gregorio Gandara—His grotesque appearance and strange laugh—Gandara’s wife and her habits and pets—My dislike of hairless dogs—Gandara’s daughters—A pet ostrich—In the peach orchard—Gandara’s herds of piebald brood mares—His masterful temper—His own saddle-horses—Creating a sensation at gaucho gatherings—The younger daughter’s lovers—Her marriage at our house—The priest and the wedding breakfast—Demetria forsaken by her husband
CHAPTER XII: THE HEAD OF A DECAYED HOUSE
The Estancia Cañada Seca—Low lands and floods—Don Anastacio, a gaucho exquisite—A greatly respected man—Poor relations—Don Anastacio a pig-fancier—Narrow escape from a pig—Charm of the low green lands—The flower called màcachina—A sweet-tasting bulb—Beauty of the green flower-sprinkled turf—A haunt of the golden plover—The bolas—My plover-hunting experience—Rebuked by a gaucho—A green spot, our playground in summer and lake in winter—The venomous toad-like Ceratophrys—Vocal performance of the toad-like creature—We make war on them—The great lake battle and its results
CHAPTER XIII: A PATRIARCH OF THE PAMPAS
The grand old man of the plains—Don Evaristo Peñalva, the Patriarch—My first sight of his estancia house—Don Evaristo described—A husband of six wives—How he was esteemed and loved by every one—On leaving home I lose sight of Don Evaristo—I meet him again after seven years—His failing health—His old first wife and her daughter, Cipriana—The tragedy of Cipriana—Don Evaristo dies and I lose sight of the family
CHAPTER XIV: THE DOVECOTE
A favourite climbing tree—The desire to fly—Soaring birds—A peregrine falcon—The dovecote and pigeon-pies—The falcon’s depredations—A splendid aerial feat—A secret enemy of the dovecote—A short-eared owl in a loft—My father and birds—A strange flower—The owls’ nesting- place—Great owl visitations
CHAPTER XV: SERPENT AND CHILD
My pleasure in bird life—Mammals at our new home—Snakes and how children are taught to regard them—A colony of snakes in the house—Their hissing confabulations—Finding serpent sloughs—A serpent’s saviour—A brief history of our English neighbours, the Blakes
CHAPTER XVI: A SERPENT MYSTERY
A new feeling about snakes—Common snakes of the country—A barren weedy patch—Discovery of a large black snake—Watching for its reappearance—Seen going to its den—The desire to see it again—A vain search—Watching a bat—The black seprent reappears at my feet—Emotions and conjectures—Melanism—My baby sister and strange snake—The mystery solved
CHAPTER XVII: A BOY’S ANIMISM
The animistic faculty and its survival in us—A boy’s animism and its persistence—Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was—Serge Aksakoff’s history of his childhood—The child’s delight in nature purely physical—First intimations of animism in the child—How it affected me—Feeling with regard to flowers—A flower and my mother—History of a flower—Animism with regard to trees—Locust trees by moonlight—Animism and nature-worship—Animistic emotion not uncommon—Cowper and the Yardley oak—The religionist’s fear of nature—Pantheistic Christianity—Survival of nature-worship in England—The feeling for nature —Wordsworth’s pantheism and animistic emotion in poetry
CHAPTER XVIII: THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER
Mr. Trigg recalled—His successor—Father O’Keefe—His mild rule and love of angling—My brother is assisted in his studies by the priest—Happy fishing afternoons—The priest leaves us—How he had been working out his own salvation—We run wild once more—My brother’s plan for a journal to be called The Tin Box—Our imperious editor’s exactions—My little brother revolts—The Tin Box smashed up—The loss it was to me
CHAPTER XIX: BROTHERS
Our third and last schoolmaster—His many accomplishments—His weakness and final breakdown—My important brother—Four brothers, unlike in everything except the voice—A strange meeting—Jack the Killer, his life and character—A terrible fight—My brother seeks instructions from Jack—The gaucho’s way of fighting and Jack’s contrasted—Our sham fight with knives—A wound and the result—My feeling about Jack and his eyes—Bird-lore—My two elder brothers’ practical joke
CHAPTER XX: BIRDING IN THE MARSHES
Visiting the marshes—Pajonales and juncales—Abundant bird life—A coots’ metropolis—Frightening the coots—Grebe and painted snipe colonies—The haunt of the social marsh hawk—The beautiful jacana and its eggs—The colony of marsh trupials—The bird’s music—The aquatic plant durasmillo—The trupial’s nest and eggs—Recalling a beauty that has vanished—Our games with gaucho boys—I am injured by a bad boy—The shepherd’s advice—Getting my revenge in a treacherous manner—Was it right or wrong?—The game of hunting the ostrich
CHAPTER XXI: WILD-FOWLING ADVENTURES
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