48 Ldle 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 direc- 
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 in 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 
