The Plains of Patagonia. 219 



mind is clearer than it has ever been ; the nerves 

 are steel ; there is nothing felt bnt a wonderfnl 

 strength and fury and daring. Looking back at 

 certain perilous moments in my own life, I remember 

 them with a kind of joy ; not that there was any 

 jojrful excitement then, but because they brought 

 me a new expei'ience — a new nature, as it were — 

 and lifted me for a time above myself. And yet, 

 comparing myself with other men, I find that on 

 ordinary occasions my courage is rather below than 

 above the average. And probably this instinctive 

 courage, which flashes out so brightly on occasions, 

 is inherited by a very large majority of the male 

 children born into the world ; only in civilized life 

 the exact conjuncture of circumstances needed to 

 call it into activity rarely occurs. 



In hunting, again, instinctive impulses come very 

 much to the surface. Leech caricatured G-allic 

 ignorance of fox-hunting in England when he made 

 his French gentleman gallop over the hounds and 

 dash away to capture the fox himself ; but the 

 sketch may be also taken as a comic illustration of 

 a feeling that exists in every one of us. If any 

 sportsman among my readers has ever been con- 

 fronted with some wild animal — a wild dog, a pig, 

 or cat, let us say — when he had no firearm or other 

 weapon to kill it in the usual civilized way, and has 

 nevertheless attacked it, driven by a sudden uncon- 

 trollable impulse, with a hunting knife, or anything 

 that came to hand, and has succeeded in slaying it, 

 I would ask such a one whether this victory did not 



