A Traveller in Little Things

by W. H. Hudson

There's no connection—not the slightest—between this two and the other twos; it was nevertheless the telling of the stories of the brothers which brought back to me this ancient memory of two houses. Nor were the two houses connected in any way, except that they were both white, situated on the same road, on the same side of it; also both stood a little way back from the road in grounds beautifully shaded with old trees. It was the great southern road which leads from the city of Buenos Ayres, the Argentine capital, to the vast level cattle-country of the pampas, where I was born and bred. Naturally it was a tremendously exciting adventure to a child's mind to come from these immense open plains, where one lived in rude surroundings with the semi-barbarous gauchos for only neighbours, to a great civilised town full of people and of things strange and beautiful to see. And to touch and taste.

Thus it happened that when I, a child, with my brothers and sisters, were taken to visit the town we would become more and more excited as we approached it at the end of a long journey, which usually took us two days, at all we saw—ox-carts and carriages and men on horseback on the wide hot dusty road, and the houses and groves and gardens on either side…. It was thus that we became acquainted with the two white houses, and were attracted to them because in their whiteness and green shade they looked beautiful to us and cool and restful, and we wished we could live in them.

They were well outside of the town, the nearest being about two miles from its old south wall and fortifications, the other one a little over two miles further out. The last being the farthest out was the first one we came to on our journeys to the city; it was a somewhat singular-looking building with a verandah supported by pillars painted green, and it had a high turret. And near it was a large dovecot with a cloud of pigeons usually flying about it, and we came to calling it Dovecot House. The second house was plainer in form but was not without a peculiar distinction in its large wrought-iron front gate with white pillars on each side, and in front of each pillar a large cannon planted postwise in the earth.

This we called Cannon House, but who lived in these two houses none could tell us.

When I was old enough to ride as well as any grown-up, and my occasional visits to town were made on horseback, I once had three young men for my companions, the oldest about twenty-eight, the two not more than nineteen and twenty-one respectively. I was eagerly looking out for the first white house, and when we were coming to it I cried out, "Now we are coming to Dovecot House, let's go slow and look at it."

Without a word they all pulled up, and for some minutes we sat silently gazing at the house. Then the eldest of the three said that if he was a rich man he would buy the house and pass the rest of his life very happily in it and in the shade of its old trees.

In what, the others asked, would his happiness consist, since a rational being must have something besides a mere shelter from the storm and a tree to shade him from the sun to be happy?

He answered that after securing the house he would range the whole country in search of the most beautiful woman in it, and that when he had found and made her his wife he would spend his days and years in adoring her for her beauty and charm.

His two young companions laughed scornfully. Then one of them—the younger—said that he too if wealthy would buy the house, as he had not seen another so well suited for the life he would like to live. A life spent with books! He would send to Europe for all the books he desired to read and would fill the house with them; and he would spend his days in the house or in the shade of the trees, reading every day from morning to night undisturbed by traffic and politics and revolutions in the land, and by happenings all the world over.

He too was well laughed at; then the last of the three said he didn't care for either of their ideals. He liked wine best, and if he had great wealth he would buy the house and send to Europe—O not for books nor for a beautiful wife! but for wine—wines of all the choicest kinds in bottle and casks—and fill the cellars with it. And his choice wines would bring choice spirits to help him drink them; and then in the shade of the old trees they would have their table and sit over their wine—the merriest, wittiest, wisest, most eloquent gathering in all the land.