The Captain's wife, this boy's mother, was a lady of Buenos Ayres,
of Spanish descent, and had died while the child was in his cradle. These
two motherless children were as strange a pair as one roof could well
cover. Both handsome, wild, impetuous, unmanageable, they played and fought
together like two young leopards, beautiful, but dangerous, their lawless
instincts showing through all their graceful movements.
The boy was little else than a young _Gaucho_ when he first came to
Rockland; for he had learned to ride almost as soon as to walk, and could
jump on his pony and trip up a runaway pig with the _bolas_ or noose him
with his miniature _lasso_ at an age when some city-children would hardly
be trusted out of sight of a nursery-maid. It makes men imperious to sit a
horse; no man governs his fellows so well as from this living throne. And
so, from Marcus Aurelius in Roman bronze, down to the "man on horseback" in
General Cushing's prophetic speech, the saddle has always been the true
seat of empire. The absolute tyranny of the human will over a noble and
powerful beast develops the instinct of personal prevalence and dominion;
so that horse-subduer and hero were almost synonymous in simpler times, and
are closely related still. An ancestry of wild riders naturally enough
bequeathes also those other tendencies which we see in the Tartars, the
Cossacks, and our own Indian Centaurs,--and as well, perhaps, in the
old-fashioned fox-hunting squire as in any of these.
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