The Plains of Patagonia. 219 
mind is clearer than it has ever been; the nerves 
are steel; there is nothing felt but a wonderful 
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 
joyful excitement then, but because they brought 
me a new experience—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 Gallic 
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 
