Patriarchs were fairly common in the land of my nativity: grave,
dignified old men with imposing beards, owners of land and cattle and
many horses, though many of them could not spell their own names;
handsome too, some of them with regular features, descendants of good
old Spanish families who colonized the wide pampas in the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. I do not think I have got one of this
sort in the preceding chapters which treat of our neighbours, unless
it be Don Anastacio Buenavida of the corkscrew curls and quaint taste
in pigs. Certainly he was of the old landowning class, and in his
refined features and delicate little hands and feet gave evidence of
good blood, but the marks of degeneration were equally plain; he was
an effeminate, futile person, and not properly to be ranked with the
patriarchs. 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.
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