herd, eating jerked beef, and sleeping, often wet, upon the ground, to p. 6lose my money, has fixed the whole adventure on my memory for life.

p. 6

Failure alone is interesting.

Successful generals with their hands scarce dry from the blood of half-armed foes; financiers, politicians; those who rise, authors whose works run to a dozen editions in a year: the men who go to colonies with or without the indispensable half-crown and come back rich, to these we give our greetings in the market-place; we make them knights, marking their children with the father’s bourgeois brand: we marvel at their fortune for a brief space, and make them doctors of civil law, exposing them during the process to be insulted by our undergraduates, then they drop out of recollection and become uninteresting, as nature formed their race.

But those who fail after a glorious fashion, Raleigh, Cervantes, Chatterton, Camoens, Blake, Claverhouse, Lovelace, Alcibiades, Parnell, and the last unknown deck-hand who, diving overboard after a comrade, sinks without saving him: these interest us, at least they interest those who, cursed with imagination, are thereby doomed themselves to the same failure as their heroes were. The world is to the unimaginative, for them are honours, titles, rank and ample waistbands; foolish phylacteries broad as trade union banners; their own esteem and death to sound of Bible leaves fluttered by sorrowing friends, with the sure hope of waking p. 7up immortal in a new world on the same pattern as the world that they have left.

p. 7

After a wretched passage down the coast, we touched at Rio, and in the Rua Direita, no doubt now called Rio Primero de Mayo or some other revolutionary date, we saw a Rio Grandense soldier on a fine black horse. As we were going to the River Plate to make our fortunes, my companion asked me what such a horse was worth, and where the Brazilian Government got their remounts. I knew no horses of the kind were bred nearer than Rio Grande, or in Uruguay, and that a horse such as the trooper rode, might in the latter country be worth an ounce. We learned in Rio that his price was eighty dollars, and immediately a golden future rose before our eyes. What could be easier than in Uruguay, which I knew well and where I had many friends (now almost to a man dead in the revolutions or killed by rum), to buy the horses and drive them overland to the Brazilian capital?

We were so confident of the soundness of our 

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