It is not an uncommon thing in the Argentino pampas--I have on two occasions witnessed it myself--for a riding-horse to come home, or to the gate of his owner's house, to die. I am speaking of riding-horses that are never doctored, nor treated mercifully; that look on their master as an enemy rather than a friend; horses that live out in the open, and have to be hunted to the corral or enclosure, or roughly captured with a lasso as they run, when their services are required. I retain a very vivid recollection of the first occasion of witnessing an action of this kind in a horse, although I was only a boy at the time. On going out one summer evening I saw one of the horses of the establishment standing unsaddled and unbridled leaning his head over the gate. Going to the spot, I stroked his nose, and then, turning to an old native who happened to be near, asked him what could be the meaning of such a thing. "I think he is going to die," he answered; "horses often come to the house to die." And next morning the poor beast was found lying dead not twenty yards from the gate; although he had not appeared ill when I stroked his nose on the previous evening; but when I saw him lying there dead, and remembered the old native's words, it seemed to me as marvellous and inexplicable that a horse should act in that way, as if some wild creature--a rhea, a fawn, or dolichotes--had come to exhale his last breath at the gates of his enemy and constant persecutor, man. I now believe that the sensations of sickness and approaching death in the riding-horse of the pampas resemble or similate the pains, so often experienced, of hunger, thirst and fatigue combined, together with the oppressive sensations caused by the ponderous native saddle, or recado, with its huge surcingle of raw hide drawn up so tightly as to hinder free respiration. The suffering animal remembers how at the last relief invariably came, when the twelve or fifteen hours' torture were over, the toil and the want, and when the great iron bridle and ponderous gear were removed, and he had freedom and food and drink and rest. At the gate or at the door of his master's house, the sudden relief had always come to him; and there does he sometimes go in his sickness, his fear overmastered by his suffering, to find it again.