Aspects of the Valley. 47 
and casting its warm, bleeding body into the 
current. 
Even the European colonists have not been un- 
affected psychologically by the peculiar conditions 
they live in, and by the river, on which they are 
dependent. When first I became cognizant of this 
feeling, which was very soon, I was disposed to 
laugh a little at the very large place the river 
occupied in all men’s minds; but after a few 
months of life on its banks it was hardly less to 
me than to others, and I experienced a kind 
of shame when I recalled my former want of 
reverence, as if I had made a jest of something 
sacred. Nor to this day can I think of the Pata- 
gonian river merely as one of the rivers I know. 
Other streams, by comparison, seem vulgar, with 
no higher purpose than to water man and beast, 
and to serve, like canals, as a means of transport. 
One day, to the house where I was staying near 
the town, there came a native lady on a visit, bring- 
ing with her six bright blue-eyed children. As we, 
the elders, sat in the living-room, sipping maté and 
talking, one of the youngsters, an intelligent-looking 
boy of nine, came in from play, and getting him by 
me I amused him for a while with some yarns 
and with talk about beasts and birds. He asked 
me where I lived. My home, I said, was in the 
Buenos Ayrean pampas, far north of Patagonia. 
“Ts it near the river,” he asked, “‘ right on the 
bank, like this house ?”’ 
I explained that it was on a great, grassy, level 
