A Vanished Arcadia: being some account of the Jesuits in Paraguay 1607-1767

Certain it is that in youth when alone the historian or the horseman may be formed, I did little to fit myself for writing history. Wandering about the countries of which now I treat, I had almost as little object in my travels as a Gaucho of the outside `camps'. I never took a note on any subject under heaven nor kept a diary by means of which my youth departed and the countries I once knew so well transmogrified, I could sitting beside the fire read and enjoy the sadness of revisiting in my mind's eye scenes that I now remember indistinctly as in a dream.