82 Ldle Days tn 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. Itis 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 
