THE SERPENT’S STRANGENESS 163 
times strikes us very forcibly. One day I stood 
watching a group of a dozen children playing in a 
small open green space in London; its openness to 
the sky and the green, elastic turf under their feet 
had suddenly made them mad with joy. Watching 
them I could not help laughing when all at once 
I remembered having once watched a group of 
children of about the same size as these on a spot 
of green turf in a distant region, playing the same 
rude game in the same way, with the same shrill, 
excited cries; and these were children of un- 
adulterated savages—the nomad ‘Tehuelches of 
Patagonia! In some savage tribes the adults are 
invariably of a gloomy, taciturn disposition—the 
“buoyant child surviving in the man” would be 
as astonishing a phenomenon to them as a fellow- 
creature with the melodious throat of a Rubini, 
or a pair of purple wings on his shoulders. The 
children of these people sit silent and unsmiling 
among their elders in the house, as if the burden 
of eternal care had been inherited by them from 
birth; but every day the grave young monkeys 
find a chance to steal off, and when they have got 
to some secluded spot in the woods, out of earshot 
of the village, a sudden transformation takes 
place: they are out of school, and as merry and 
shrill at their games and mock battles as any 
rough set of urchins just released from their lessons 
in our own land. 
Many pages might be filled with similar instances. 
And when we consider what the law is, and that 
