Horse and Man. 35 1 



that would drive other men to despair, his laborious 

 days and feats of horsemanship, the long journeys 

 he performs without rest or food, seem to simple 

 dwellers on the surface of the earth almost like 

 miracles. Deprive him of his horse, and he can do 

 nothing but sit on the ground cross-legged, or en 

 cuclillas, — on his heels. You have, to use his own 

 figurative language, cut off his feet. 



Darwin in his earlier years appears not to have 

 possessed the power of reading men with that 

 miraculous intelligence always distinguishing his 

 researches concerning other and lower orders of 

 beings. In the Voyage of a Naturalist, speaking of 

 this supposed indolence of the gauchos, he tells 

 that in one place where workmen were in great 

 request, seeing a poor gaucho sitting in a listless 

 attitude, he asked him why he did not work. The 

 man's answer was that he was too poor to work ! The 

 philosopher was astonished and amused at the reply, 

 but failed to understand it. And yet, to one ac- 

 quainted with these lovers of brief phrases, what 

 more intelligible answer could have been returned ? 

 The poor fellow simply meant to say that his horses 

 had been stolen — a thing of frequent occurrence in 

 that country, or, perhaps, that some minion of the 

 Grovernment of the moment had seized them for the 

 use of the State. 



To return to the starting point, the pleasures of 

 riding do not flow exclusively from the agreeable 

 sensations attendant on flight-like motion ; there is 

 also the knowledge, sweet in itself, that not a mere 

 cunningly fashioned machine, like that fabled horse 

 of brass " on which the Tartar king did ride/' 



