It Was A Revelation, He Said, And Lamented That He And His People Had
Not This Secret Before.
He, too, had a peach orchard, and when the
fruit ripened his family, assisted by all their neighbours, feasted
from morning till night on peaches, and hardly left room in their
stomachs for roast meat when it was dinner-time.
The consequence was
that in a very few weeks - he could almost say days - the fruit was all
gone, and they had to say, "No more peaches for another twelve
months!" All that would now be changed. He would command his wife and
daughters to pickle peaches - a cask-full, or two or three if one would
not be enough. He would provide vinegar - many gallons of it, and
cloves by the handful. And when they had got their pickled peaches he
would have cold mutton for supper every day all the year round, and
enjoy his life as he had never done before!
This amused us very much, as we knew that poor Don Ventura,
notwithstanding his loud commanding voice, had little or no authority
in his house; that it was ruled by his wife, assisted by a council of
four marriageable daughters, whose present objects in life were little
dances and other amusements, and lovers with courage enough to marry
them or carry them off.
CHAPTER XV
SERPENT AND CHILD
My pleasure in bird life - Mammals at our new home - Snakes and how
children are taught to regard them - A colony of snakes in the house -
Their hissing confabulations - Finding serpent sloughs - A serpent's
saviour - A brief history of our English neighbours, the Blakes.
It is not an uncommon thing, I fancy, for a child or boy to be more
deeply impressed and stirred at the sight of a snake than of any other
creature. This at all events is my experience. Birds certainly gave me
more pleasure than other animals, and this too is no doubt common with
children, and I take the reason of it to be not only because birds
exceed in beauty, but also on account of the intensity of life they
exhibit - a life so vivid, so brilliant, as to make that of other
beings, such as reptiles and mammals, seem a rather poor thing by
comparison. But while birds were more than all other beings to me,
mammals too had a great attraction. I have already spoken of rats,
opossums, and armadillos; also of the vizcacha, the big burrowing
rodent that made his villages all over the plain. One of my early
experiences is of the tremendous outcry these animals would make at
night when suddenly startled by a very loud noise, as by a clap of
thunder. When we had visitors from town, especially persons new to the
country who did not know the vizcacha, they would be taken out after
supper, a little distance from the house, when the plain was all dark
and profoundly silent, and after standing still for a few minutes to
give them time to feel the silence, a gun would be discharged, and
after two or three seconds the report would be followed by an
extraordinary hullabaloo, a wild outcry of hundreds and thousands of
voices, from all over the plain for miles round, voices that seemed to
come from hundreds of different species of animals, so varied they
were, from the deepest booming sounds to the high shrieks and squeals
of shrill-voiced birds.
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