teenth century. How this ponderous work ever came to be out on
the pampas, over six thousand miles from the land of its origin, is
a thing to wonder at. I remember that the Stonehenge plate greatly
impressed me and that I sacrilegiously cut it out of the book so as to
have it!

Now we know, our reason tells us continually, that the mental pictures
formed in childhood are false because the child and man have different
standards, and furthermore the child mind exaggerates everything;
nevertheless, such pictures persist until the scene or object so
visualized is actually looked upon and the old image shattered. This
refers to scenes visualized with the inner eye, but the disillusion is
almost as great when we return to a home left in childhood or boyhood
and look on it once more with the man's eyes. How small it is! How
diminished the hills, and the trees that grew to such a vast height,
whose tops once seemed "so close against the sky"--what poor little
trees they now are! And the house itself, how low it is; and the rooms
that seemed so wide and lofty, where our footfalls and childish voices
sounded as in some vast hall, how little and how mean they look!

Children, they are very little,

the poet says, and they measure things by their size; but it seems odd
that unless we grow up amid the scenes where our first impressions
were received they should remain unaltered in the adult mind. The most
amusing instance of a false picture of something seen in childhood and
continuing through life I have met was that of an Italian peasant I knew
in South America. He liked to talk to me about the cranes, those great
and wonderful birds he had become acquainted with in childhood in his
home on the plains of Lombardy. The birds, of course, only appeared in
autumn and spring when migrating, and passed over at a vast height above
the earth. These birds, he said, were so big and had such great wings
that if they came down on the flat earth they would be incapable of
rising, hence they only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as
there was nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock
and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's droppings. Now
it came to pass that one year during his childhood a crane, owing
to some accident, came down to the ground near his home. The whole
population of the village turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and
were amazed at its size; it was, he said, the strange