Horse and Man. 
351 
tliat would drive other men to despair^ his laborious 
days and feats of horsemanshipj 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 
cucUllas ^ — 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 ivas too poor to luorh ! 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 
Government 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, swmet in itself, that not a mere 
cunningly fashioned machine, like that fabled horse 
of brass on which the Tartar king did ride,” 
