LITTLE MEXICAN AND OTHER STORIES BY THE SAME AUTHOR ANTIC HAY: A NOVEL CROME YELLOW: A NOVEL MORTAL COILS: SHORT STORIES LIMBO: SHORT STORIES LEDA: AND OTHER POEMS ON THE MARGIN: NOTES & ESSAYS LITTLE MEXICAN & OTHER STORIES BY ALDOUS HUXLEY LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS 1924 _PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN_ _ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_ CONTENTS UNCLE SPENCER _page_ 1 LITTLE MEXICAN 155 HUBERT AND MINNIE 213 FARD 236 THE PORTRAIT 247 YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 271 UNCLE SPENCER Some people I know can look back over the long series of their childish holidays and see in their memory always a different landscape--chalk downs or Swiss mountains; a blue and sunny sea or the grey, ever-troubled fringe of the ocean; heathery moors under the cloud with far away a patch of sunlight on the hills, golden as happiness and, like happiness, remote, precarious, impermanent, or the untroubled waters of Como, the cypresses and the Easter roses. I envy them the variety of their impressions. For it is good to have seen something of the world with childish eyes, disinterestedly and uncritically, observing not what is useful or beautiful and interesting, but only such things as, to a being less than four feet high and having no knowledge of life or art, seem immediately significant. It is the beggars, it is the green umbrellas under which the cabmen sit when it rains, not Brunelleschi’s dome, not the extortions of the hotel-keeper, not the tombs of the Medici that impress the childish traveller. Such impressions, it is true, are of no particular value to us when we are grown up. (The famous wisdom of babes, with those childish intimations of immortality and all the rest, never really amounted to very much; and the man who studies the souls of children in the hope of finding out something about the souls of men is about as likely to discover something important as the man who thinks he can explain Beethoven by referring him to the savage origins of music or religion by referring it to the sexual instincts.) None the less, it is good to have had such childish impressions, if only for the sake of comparing (so that we may draw the philosophic moral) what we saw of a place when we were six or seven with what we see again at thirty.