Labourers On The Lands That Were Once Owned By Their Forefathers, And Children Of Long Generations Of Labourers, Yet Still Exhibiting The Marks Of Their Aristocratic Descent, The Fine Features And Expression And The Fine Moral Qualities With Which They Are Correlated.

I will now give in illustration an old South American experience, an example, which deeply impressed me at the time, of the sharp contrast between a remote descendant of aristocrats and a child of the people in a country where class distinctions have long ceased to exist.

It happened that I went to stay at a cattle ranch for two or three months one summer, in a part of the country new to me, where I knew scarcely anyone. It was a good spot for my purpose, which was bird study, and this wholly occupied my mind. By-and-by I heard about two brothers, aged respectively twenty-three and twenty-four years, who lived in the neighbourhood on a cattle ranch inherited from their father, who had died young. They had no relations and were the last of their name in that part of the country, and their grazing land was but a remnant of the estate as it had been a century before. The name of the brothers first attracted my attention, for it was that of an old highly-distinguished family of Spain, two or three of whose adventurous sons had gone to South America early in the seventeenth century to seek their fortunes, and had settled there.

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