That Enchanting Part Of The Marsh, With Its Forest Of Graceful
Miniature Trees, Where The Social Trupials Sang And Wove
Their nests
and reared their young in company - that very spot is now, I dare say,
one immense field of
Corn, lucerne, or flax, and the people who now
live and labour there know nothing of its former beautiful
inhabitants, nor have they ever seen or even heard of the purple-
plumaged trupial, with its chestnut cap and its delicate trilling
song. And when I recall these vanished scenes, those rushy and flowery
meres, with their varied and multitudinous wild bird life - the cloud
of shining wings, the heart-enlivening wild cries, the joy unspeakable
it was to me in those early years - I am glad to think I shall never
revisit them, that I shall finish my life thousands of miles removed
from them, cherishing to the end in my heart the image of a beauty
which has vanished from earth.
My elder brother occasionally accompanied us on our egg-hunting visits
to the lagoons, and he also joined us in our rides to the two or three
streams where we used to go to bathe and fish; but he took no part in
our games and pastimes with the gaucho boys: they were beneath him. We
ran races on our ponies, and when there were race-meetings in our
neighbourhood my father would give us a little money to go and enter
our ponies in a boys' race.
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