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
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.
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