I Believe, From Later Experience, That Even If It Had
Lasted But A Few Weeks It Would Have Given Me The Habit Of Recording
My Observations, And That Is A Habit Without Which The Keenest
Observation And The Most Faithful Memory Are Not Sufficient For The
Field Naturalist.
Thus, through the destruction of the Tin Box, I
believe I lost a great part of the result of
Six years of life with
wild nature, since it was not until six years after my little
brother's rebellious act that I discovered the necessity of making a
note of every interesting thing I witnessed.
CHAPTER XIX
BROTHERS
Our third and last schoolmaster - His many accomplishments - His
weakness and final breakdown - My important brother - Four brothers,
unlike in everything except the voice - A strange meeting - Jack the
Killer, his life and character - A terrible fight - My brother seeks
instructions from Jack - The gaucho's way of fighting and Jack's
contrasted - Our sham fight with knives - A wound and the result - My
feeling about Jack and his eyes - Bird-lore - My two elder brothers'
practical joke.
The vanishing of the unholy priest from our ken left us just about
where we had been before his large red face had lifted itself above
our horizon. At all events the illumination had not been great. And
thereafter it was holiday once more for a goodish time until yet a
third tutor came upon the scene: - yet another stranger in a strange
land who had fallen into low (and hot) water and was willing to fill a
vacant time in educating us. Just as in the case of the O'Keefe, he
was thrust upon my good-natured and credulous father by his friends in
the capital, who had this gentleman with them and were anxious to get
him off their hands. He was, they assured my father, just the man he
wanted, a fine fellow of good family, highly educated and all that;
but he had been a bit wild, and all that was wanted to bring him round
was to get him out a good distance from the capital and its
temptations and into a quiet, peaceful home like ours. Strange to say,
he actually turned out to be all they had said, and more. He had
studied hard at college and when reading for a profession; he was a
linguist, a musician, he had literary tastes, and was well read in
science, and above all he was a first-rate mathematician. Naturally,
to my studious brother he came as an angel beautiful and bright, with
no suggestion of the fiend in him; for not only was he a
mathematician, but he was also an accomplished fencer and boxer. And
so the two were soon fast friends, and worked hard together over their
books, and would then repair for an hour or two every day to the
plantation to fence and box and practise with pistol and rifle at the
target. He also took to the humbler task of teaching the rest of us
with considerable zeal, and succeeded in rousing a certain enthusiasm
in us.
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