The gaucho is more or less bow-legged; and, of course, the more crooked his legs are, the better for him in his struggle for existence. Off his horse his motions are awkward, like those of certain tardigrade mammals of arboreal habits when removed from their tree. He waddles in his walk;
Gancho.
his hands feel for the reins; his toes turn inwards like a duck's. And here, perhaps, we can see why foreign travellers, judging him from their own standpoint, invariably bring against him the charge of laziness. On horseback he is of all men most active. His patient endurance under privations
Horse and Man. 351
that would drive other men to despair, his laborious days and feats of horsemanship, 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 cuclillas,--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 was too poor to work! The philosopher was astonished and amused at the reply, but failed to understand it. And yet, to one acquainted 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, sweet in itself, that not a mere cunningly fashioned machine, like that fabled horse of brass "on which the Tartar king did ride,"