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