48 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



plain, that there was no river there, and that when 

 I went out on horseback I did not have to ride up 

 and down a valley, but galloped away in any dire c- 

 tion north, south, east, or west. He listened with 

 a twinkle in his eyes, then with a merry laugh ran 

 out again to join the others at their game. It was 

 as if I had told him that I lived up in a tree that 

 grew to the clouds, or under the sea, or some such 

 impossible thing; it was nothing but a joke to him. 

 His mother, sitting near, had been listening to us, 

 and when the boy laughed and ran out, I remarked 

 to her that to a child born and living always in that 

 valley, shut in by the thorny, waterless uplands, it 

 was, perhaps, inconceivable that ir other places 

 people could exist out of a valley and away from a 

 river. She looked at me with a puzzled expression 

 in her eyes, as if trying to see something mentally 

 which her eyes had never seen trying, in fact, to 

 create something out of nothing. She agreed with 

 me in some hesitating words, and I felt that I had 

 put my foot in it ; for only then I recalled the fact 

 that she also had been born in the valley the great- 

 grand-daughter of one of the original founders of 

 the colony and was probably as incapable as the 

 child of imagining any other conditions than those 

 she had always been accustomed to. 



It struck me that the children here have a very 

 healthy, happy life, especially those whose homes 

 are in the narrow parts of the valley, who are able 

 to ramble every day into the thorny uplands in 

 search of birds' eggs and other pretty things, and the 



