He had come by diligence from Villa Mercedes, accomplishing the journey, therefore, in a few days, which had occupied us in our caravan about as many weeks.
We were delighted to see him looking so well. Why, he had even already commenced to get brown, and was altogether hardy and hearty and manlike.
We were old estancieros, however, and it gave us unalloyed delight to show him round our place and put him up to all the outs and ins of a settler's life.
Dugald even took him away to the hills with him, and the two of them did not get home until dinner was on the table.
Archie, however, although not without plenty of pluck and willingness to develop into an estanciero pure and simple, had not the stamina my brothers and I possessed, but this only made us all the more kind to him. In time, we told him, he would be quite as strong and wiry as any of us.
'There is one thing I don't think I shall ever be able to 186 get over,' said Archie one day. It may be observed that he did not now talk with the London drawl; he had left both his cockney tongue and his tall hat at home.
'What is it you do not think you will ever get over, Arch?' I asked.
'Why, the abominable creepies,' he answered, looking almost miserable.
'Why,' he continued, 'it isn't so much that I mind being bitten by mosquitoes—of which it seems you have brutes that fly by day, and gangs that go on regular duty at night—but it is the other abominations that make my blood run positively cold. Now your cockroaches are all very well down in the coal-cellar, and centipedes are interesting creatures in glass cases with pins stuck through them; but to find cockroaches in your boots and centipedes in your bed is rather too much of a good thing.'
'Well,' said Dugald, laughing, 'you'll get used to even that. I don't really mind now what bites me or what crawls over me. Besides, you know all those creepie-creepies, as you call them, afford one so excellent an opportunity of studying natural history from the life.'