82 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



always called it black, although it may now seem 

 purple or blue or some other colour. We learn a 

 kind of emasculated language in the nursery, from 

 schoolmasters, and books written indoors, and it 

 has to serve us. It proves false, but its falsity is 

 perhaps never clearly recognized ; nature eman- 

 cipates us and the feeling changes, but there, has 

 been no conscious reasoning on the matter, and 

 thought is vague. One hears a person relating the 

 struggles and storms of his early or past life, and 

 receiving without protest expressions of sympathy 

 and pity from his listeners ; but he knows in his 

 heart, albeit his brain may be and generally is in a 

 mist, that these were the very things that exhilarated 

 him, that if he had missed them his life would have 

 been savourless. For the healthy man, or for the 

 man whose virile instincts have not become 

 atrophied in the artificial conditions we exist in, 

 strife of some kind, if not physical then mental, is 

 essential to happiness. It is a principle of nature 

 that only by means of strife can strength be main- 

 tained. No sooner is any species placed above it, 

 or over-protected, than degeneration begins. But 

 about the condition of the inferior animals, with 

 regard to the comparative dulness or brightness of 

 their lives, we do not concern ourselves. It is 

 pleasant to be able to believe that they are all in a 

 sense happy, although hard to believe that they are 

 happy in the same degree. The sloth, for instance, 

 that most over-protected mammalian, fast asleep 

 as he hugs his branch, and the wild cat that has to 



