324 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
pampas — I have on two occasions witnessed it my- 
self — for a riding-horse to come home, or to the 
gate of his owner's house, to die, I am speaking of 
riding-horses that are never doctored, nor treated 
mercifully ; that look on their master as an enemy 
rather than a friend ; horses that live out in the 
open, and have to be hunted to the corral or enclo- 
sure, or roughly captured with a lasso as they run, 
when their services are required. I retain a very vivid 
recollection of the first occasion of witnessing an 
action of this kind in a horse, although I was only a 
boy at the time. On going out one summer evening 
I saw one of the horses of the establishment stand- 
ing unsaddled and unbridled leaning his head over 
the gate. Going to the spot, I stroked his nose, and 
then, turning to an old native wdio happened to be 
near, asked him what could be the meaning of such 
a thing, I think he is going to die," he answered ; 
horses often come to the house to die." And next 
morning the poor beast was found lying dead not 
twenty yards from the gate ; although he had not 
appeared ill when I stroked his nose on the previous 
evening ; but when I saw him lying there dead, and 
remembered the old native’s words, it seemed to 
me as marvellous and inexplicable that a horse 
should act in that way, as if some wild creature — -a 
rhea, a fawn, or dolichotes — had come to exhale his 
.last breath at the gates of his enemy and constant 
persecutor, man. 
I now believe that the sensations of sickness and 
approaching death in the riding-horse of the pam- 
pas resemble or similate the pains, so often expe- 
rienced, of hunger, thirst and fatigue combined, 
