The poor and more uncouth, or ridiculous, from
our childish point of view, they appeared, the more anxious my mother
would be to put them at their ease. And she would sometimes say to us
afterwards that she could not laugh with us because she remembered the
poor fellow probably had a mother somewhere in a distant country who
was perhaps thinking of him at the very time he was at the table with
us, and hoping and praying that in his wanderings he would meet with
some who would be kind to him.
I remember many of these chance guests, and will give a particular
account of one--the guest and the evening we passed in his company--as
this survives with a peculiar freshness in my memory, and it was also
a cherished recollection of my mother's.
I was then nine or ten years old, and our guest was a young Spanish
gentleman, singularly handsome, with a most engaging expression and
manner. He was on a journey from Buenos Ayres to a part in our
province some sixty or seventy leagues further south, and after asking
permission to pass the night at our house, he explained that he had
only one horse, as he liked that way of travelling rather than the
native way of driving a _tropilla_ before him, going at a furious
gallop from dawn to dark, and changing horses every three or four
leagues.
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