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.



The happiest time of my boyhood was at that early period, a little
past the age of six, when I had my own pony to ride on, and was
allowed to stay on his back just as long and go as far from home as I
liked. I was like the young bird when on first quitting the nest it
suddenly becomes conscious of its power to fly. My early flying days
were, however, soon interrupted, when my mother took me on my first
visit to Buenos Ayres; that is to say, the first I remember, as I must
have been taken there once before as an infant in arms, since we lived
too far from town for any missionary-clergyman to travel all that
distance just to baptize a little baby. Buenos Ayres is now the
wealthiest, most populous, Europeanized city in South America: what it
was like at that time these glimpses into a far past will serve to
show. Coming as a small boy of an exceptionally impressionable mind,
from that green plain where people lived the simple pastoral life,
everything I saw in the city impressed me deeply, and the sights which
impressed me the most are as vivid in my mind to-day as they ever
were. I was a solitary little boy in my rambles about the streets, for
though I had a younger brother who was my only playmate, he was not
yet five, and too small to keep me company in my walks. Nor did I mind
having no one with me. Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired
the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way, and it
was only after years, when my age was about twelve, that my mother
told me how anxious this singularity in me used to make her. She would
miss me when looking out to see what the children were doing, and I