land; and when darkness fell, the colonists had crowned their brave day's work by the capture of the imperial war-vessel Itaparica. No doubt it was soon pulled to pieces, good building material being rather expensive on the Rio Negro; a portion of the wreck, however, still lies in the river, and often, when the tide was low and those old brown timbers came up above the surface, like the gaunt fossil ribs of some gigantic pliocene monster, I have got out of my boat and stood upon them experiencing a feeling of great satisfaction. Thus the awful war-cloud burst, and the little colony, by pluck and cunning and readiness to strike at the proper moment, saved itself from the disgrace of being conquered by the infamous empire of the tropics. During my residence at the house alongside the Parrot's Cliff, one of our neighbors I was very much interested in was a man named Sosa. He was famed for an almost preternatural keenness of sight, had great experience of the wild life of the frontier, and was always employed as a scout in times of Indian warfare. He was also a celebrated horse-thief. His horsestealing propensities were ineradicable, and had to be winked at on account of his usefulness; so that he was left in a great measure to his own devices. He was, in fact, a fox hired to act as watch-dog to the colony in times of danger; and though the victims of his numberless thefts had always been anxious to wreak personal vengeance on him, his vulpine sagacity had so far enabled him to escape them all. My interest in him arose from the fact that he was the son of a man whose name figures in Argentine history. Sosa's father was an illiterate gaucho - a man of the plains possessing faculties so keen that to ordinary beings his feats of vision and hearing, and his sense of direction on the monotonous plains, seemed almost miraculous. As he also possessed other qualities suitable to a leader of men in a semi-savage region, he rose in time to the command of the south-western frontier, where his numerous victories over the Indians gave him so great a prestige that the jealousy of the dictator Rosas - the Nero of South America, as he was called by his enemies - was roused, and at his instigation Sosa was removed by means of a cup of poison. The son, though in all other respects a degenerate being, inherited his father's wonderful senses. One instance of his keen-sightedness which I heard struck me as very curious. In 1861 Sosa had found it prudent to disap - pear for a season from the colony, and in the company of five or six more gauchos - also offenders against the law, who had flown to the refuge of the desert-he amused himself by hunting ostriches along the Rio Colorado. On the 12th of March the hunters were camping beside a grove of willows in the valley, and about nine o'clock that evening, while seated round the fire roasting their ostrich meat, Sosa suddenly sprang to his feet and held his open hand high above his head for some moments. "There is not a breath of wind blowing," he exclaimed, "yet the leaves of the trees are trembling. What can this portend?" The others stared at the trees, but could see no motion, and began to laugh and jeer at him. Presently he sat down again, remarking that the trembling had ceased; but during the rest of the evening he seemed very much disturbed in his mind. He remarked repeatedly that such a thing had never happened in his experience before, for, he said, he could feel a breath of wind before the leaves felt it, and there had been no wind; he feared that it was a warning of some disaster about to overtake their party. The disaster was not for them. On that evening, when Sosa sprang up terrified and pointed to the leaves which to the others appeared motionless, occurred the earthquake which destroyed the distant city of Mendoza, crushing twelve thousand people to death in its fall. That the subterranean wave extended east to the Plata, and southwards into Patagonia, was afterwards known, for in the cities of Rosario and Buenos Ayres clocks stopped, and a slight shock was also experienced in the Carmen on the Rio Negro. My host, whose Christian name was Ventura, being a Patagonian by birth, and not far off fifty years old, must, I imagined, have seen a thousand things worth relating, and I frequently importuned him to tell some of his early experiences in the settlement. But somehow he invariably drifted into amorous and gambling remi. niscences, interesting in their way, some of them; but they were not the kind of recollections I wished to hear. The empire of his affections had been divided between Cupid and cards; and apparently everything he had seen or experienced in fifty eventful years, unless it had some relation to one of these two divinities, was clean forgotten-cast away from him like the ends of the innumerable cigarettes he had been smoking all his life. Once, however, a really interesting adventure of his boyhood was recalled accidentally to his mind. He came home one evening from the Carmen, where he had been spending the day, and during supper told me the following story. When he was about sixteen years old he was sent one day with four others three lads like himself, and a middle-aged man named Marcos in charge of them with a herd of horses required for military service at a place twenty-five leagues up the river. For, at that period, every person was at the beck and call of the commander of the colony. Halfway to their destination there was a corral, or cattle enclosure, standing two or three hundred yards from the river, but miles away from any habitation. They drove their animals into the corral, and, after unsaddling and turning loose the beasts they had ridden, were about to catch fresh horses, when a troop of Indians was spied charging down upon them. "Follow me, boys!" shouted Marcos, for there was no time to lose, and away they rushed to the river, throwing off their clothes as they ran. In a few moments they were in the water swimming for life, the shouts of the savages ringing in their ears. The river at this point was about eight hundred feet broad, with a strong current, and two of the lads dared not venture across, but escaped, diving and swimming along under the shadow of the bank like a couple of waterrats or wounded ducks, and finally concealed themselves in a reed bed at some distance. The others, led by Marcos, being good swimmers like most of the Patagonians, struck boldly out for the opposite shore. But when they approached it and were beginning to congratulate themselves on their escape, they were suddenly confronted with another party of mounted Indians, standing a few yards back from the margin and quietly waiting their arrival. They turned and swam away to the middle of the stream once more: here one of them, a youth named Damian, began to exclaim that he was getting tired, and would sink unless Marcos could save him. Marcos told him to save himself if he could; then Damian, bitterly reproaching him for his selfishness, declared that he would swim back to the side they had started from and give himself up to the Indians. Naturally they made no objection, being unable to help him; and so Damian left them, and when the Indians saw him approaching they got off their horses and came down to the margin, their lances in their hands. Of course Damian knew right well that savages seldom burden themselves with a male captive when they happen to be out on the war-path; but he was a clever boy, and though death by steel was more painful than death by drowning, there was still a faint chance that his captors might have compassion on him. He began, in fact, to appeal to their mercy from the moment he abandoned his companions. "Indians! friends! brothers!" he shouted aloud from the water. "Do not kill me: in heart I am an Indian like one of yourselves, and no Christian. My skin is white, I know; but I hate my own race; to escape from them has always been my one desire. To live with the Indians I love, in the desert, that is the only wish of my heart. Spare me, brothers, take me with you, and I will serve you all my life. Let me live with you, hunt with you, fight with you - especially against the hated Christians." In the middle of the river Marcos lifted up his face and laughed hoarsely to hear this eloquent address; though they expected to see poor Damian thrust through with spears the very next moment, he could not help laughing. They watched him arrive, still loudly crying out for mercy, astonishing them very much with his oratorical powers, for Damian had not hitherto made any display of this kind of talent. The Indians took him by the hands and drew him out of the water, then, surrounding him, walked him away to the corral, and from that moment Damian disappeared from the valley; for on a search being made afterwards, not even his bones, picked clean by vultures and foxes, could be found. After seeing the last of their comrade, and keeping themselves afloat with the least possible exertion, Marcos and Ventura were carried down stream by the swift current till they gained a small island in the middle of the river. With the drift-wood found on it they constructed a raft, binding the sticks together with long grass and rushes, and on it they floated down stream to the inhabited portion of the valley, and so eventually made their escape. The reason why my host told me this story instead of one of his usual love intrigues or gambling adventures was because that very day he had seen Damian once more, just returned to the settlement where he had so long been forgotten by every one. Thirty years of exposure to the sun and wind of the desert had made him so brown, while in manner and speech he had grown so like an Indian, that the poor amateur savage found it hard at first guanaco, ostrich, and wild horse; and beyond all in the west the stupendous mountain range of the Cordilleras a realm of enchantment and ever-changing beauty. Very soon, however, when the novelty of the new life had worn off, together with the exultation he had experienced at his escape from cruel death, his heart began to be eaten up with secret grief, and he pined for his own people again. Escape was impossible; to have revealed his true feelings would have exposed him to in to establish his identity. His relations had, however, been poor, and had long passed away, leaving nothing for him to inherit, so that there was no reason to discredit his strange story. He related that when the Indians drew him from the water and carried him back to the corral they disagreed amongst themselves as to what they should do to him. Luckily one of them understood Spanish, and translated to the others the substance of Damian's speech delivered from the water. When they questioned their captive hestant cruel death. To take kindly to the invented many other ingenious lies, saying that he was a poor orphan boy, and that the cruel treatment his master subjected him to had made him resolve to escape to the Indians. The only feeling he had towards his own race, he assured them, was one of undying animosity; and he was ready to vow that if they would only let him join their tribe he would always be ready for a raid on the Christian settlement. To see the entire white race swept away with fire and steel was, in fact, the cherished hope of his heart. Their savage breasts were touched with his piteous tale of sufferings; his revengeful feelings were believed to be genuine, and they took him to their own home, where he was permittted to share in the simple delights of the aborigines. They belonged to a tribe very powerful at that time, inhabiting a district called Las Manzanas—that is, the Apple Country situated at the sources of the Rio Negro in the vicinity of the Andes. There is a tradition that shortly after the conquest of South America a few courageous Jesuit priests crossed over from Chili to the eastern slopes of the Andes to preach Christianity to the tribes there, and that they took with them implements of husbandry, grain, and seeds of European fruits. The missionaries soon met their death, and all that remained of their labors among the heathen were a few apple-trees they had planted. These trees found a soil and climate so favorable, that they soon began to propagate spontaneously, becoming exceedingly abundant. Certain it is that now, after two or three centuries of neglect by man, these wild apple-trees still yield excellent fruit, which the Indians eat, and from which they also make a fermented liquor they call chi chi. To this far-off fertile region Damian was taken to lead the kind of life he professed to love. Here were hill, forest, and clear, swift river, great undulating plains, the pleasant pasture lands of the VOL. LI. 2628 LIVING AGE. savage way of life, outwardly at least, was now his only course. With cheerful countenance he went forth on long hunting expeditions in the depth of winter, exposed all day to bitter cold and furious storms of wind and sleet, cursed and beaten for his awkwardness by his fellow. huntsmen; at night stretching his aching limbs on the wet, stony ground, with the rug they permitted him to wear for only covering. When the hunters were unlucky it was customary to slaughter a horse for food. The wretched animal would be first drawn up by its hind legs and suspended from the branches of a great tree, so that all the blood might be caught, for this is the chief delicacy of the Patagonian savage. An artery would be opened in the neck and the spouting blood caught in large earthen vessels; then, when the savages gathered round to the feast, poor Damian would be with them to drink his share of the abhorred liquid, hot from the heart of the still living brute. In autumn, when the apples were fer. mented in pits dug in the earth and lined with horse hides to prevent the juice from escaping, he would take part, as became a true savage, in the grand annual drinking bouts. The women would first go round carefully gathering up all knives, spears, bolas, or other weapons dangerous in the hands of drunken men, to carry them away into the forest, where they would conceal themselves with the chil dren. Then for days the warriors would give themselves up to the joys of intoxication; and at such times unhappy Damian would come in for a large share of ridicule, blows, and execrations; the Indians being full of boisterous fun or else truculent in their cups, and loving above all things to have a "white fool" for a butt. At length, when he came to man's estate, was fluent in their language, and outwardly in all things like a savage, a wife was bestowed on him, and she bore him several children. Those he had first their old home, she would still wait for From The Nineteenth Century. A SWAIN OF ARCADY. known as grown up or old men gradually died off, were killed, or drifted away; children who had always known Damian as one of the tribe grew to manhood, and it was forgotten that he had ever been a Christian and a captive. Yet still, with his helpmate by his side, weaving rugs and raiment for him or ministering to his wants for the Indian wife is always industrious and the patient, willing, affectionate slave of her lord and with all his young barbarians at play on the grass before his hut, he would sit in the waning sunlight oppressed with sorrow, dreaming "The individual withers, and the world is more and the old dreams he could not banish from his heart. And at last, when his wife began to grow wrinkled and dark-skinned, as a middle-aged Indian mother invariably does, and when his children were becoming men, the gnawing discontent at his breast made him resolve to leave the tribe and the life he secretly hated. He joined a hunting party going towards the Atlantic coast, and after travelling for some days with them his opportunity came, when he secretly left them and made his way alone to the Carmen. "And there he is," concluded Ventura, when he had told the story with undis guised contempt for Damian in his tone, "an Indian and nothing less! Does he imagine he can ever be like one of us after living that life for thirty years? If Marcos were alive, how he would laugh to see Damian back again, sitting cross legged on the floor, solemn as a cacique, brown as old leather, and calling himself a white man! Yet here he says he will remain, and here amongst Christians he will die. Fool, why did he not escape twenty years ago, or, having remained so long in the desert, why has he now come back where he is not wanted?" Ventura was very unsympathetic, and appeared to have no kindly feelings left for his old companion-in-arms, but I was touched with the story I had heard. There was something pathetic in the life of that poor returned wanderer, an alien now to his own fellow-townsmen, home less amidst the pleasant vineyards, poplar groves, and old stone houses where he had first seen the light; listening to the bells from the church tower as he had listened to them in childhood, and perhaps for the first time realizing in a dull, vague kind of way that it might never more be with him as it had been in the vanished past. Possibly also, the memory of his savage spouse who had loved him many years would add some bitterness to his strange, isolated life. For, far away in more." IT is half a century and more since our laureate wrote down that melancholy line. In those days there were no railways and no steamboats worth speaking of - there were parish pounds, and stocks, and stage coaches, and strong arms thrashed the corn out with the flail; and there were prize-fights, and duels, and lotteries, and cock-fighting, and a host of other picturesque institutions which people could delight themselves with almost as they pleased. The individual in those days had incomparably more liberty of a certain kind than he has now his speech and his dress "bewrayed" him. Different parts of the country had their characteristic costumes, their characteristic dialects, their local habits of life, methods of tillage, even local eatables and drinkables; and when a man rode from London to Exeter his eyes and ears were opened to sights and sounds very strange and startling to the born Londoner, who in his turn in those days was an individual with pe culiarities of his own. All this is going, and has well nigh gone. The world is more and more. The world has grown too big for us. We are being flattened by monstrous Juggernaut wheels, which roll over us all, and reduce us all to a smirky surface of dreary, dismal, dull dead-alivism, and the individual is withering, his individualism crushed out of him-unrecognizable as anything but a tiny portion of a mass. "Look at this 'ere feller!" said an angry pig jobber to me the other day, whom I was trying to reconcile to my churchwarden." Ee don't know 'ow to write a letter the feller calls me Mister Brown on his imvilope!" It really was too bad. For are we not all esquires? Yes; and we all wear black coats, and dark trousers, and "toppers," at least in London, and socks, and the same sort of boots, and London tailors come and bother us for orders and refuse to go away. And I am told that the ladies' dressmakers make periodical journeys to Paris, and get the same patterns for the dresses, and the bonnets, and the well, the other things - for all the ladies within the four seas; and they all look like one another, or try to look like one another, from the parson's daughter up to the celestials behind Spiers and Pond's counters, including that middle class which embraces the dairymaid and the duchess. Already the enterpris. ing caterers for public amusement have been compelled to send to Japan to find a hundred queer-looking people, and I think the day cannot be far off when a museum will be opened at South Kensington for individuals who shall have survived the withering process, and whom the world shall have left out from its all-absorbing conglomerate. of laces that might crack any moment, and hooks and eyes that might go off with a bang when it was least expected of them? What had boot-hooks been invented for, sir? And invented by a great duke, too, sir! "Why, I defy a man to wear straps with your clumsy new-fangled high-lows!" There used to be a large number of individuals at the universities some years ago; they are almost utterly extinct now. I remember, when I was a freshman, meeting one of them out hunting; he wore a garment over his coat which was called a spencer, and when it came on to a blow as we rode home together, he gravely checked his horse and tied a large cotton pocket-handkerchief over his hat and under his chin, saying to me in a cautious way, "I always carry a spare handkerchief to tie my hat on with when it's rough. It's a good hint for you, young man!" I did not ask him if he kept another for fastening his head on. Perhaps he managed that with his collar! Even in our country villages we are losing our individuals. The world is getting quite too much for us - withering us, in fact. Nevertheless they are to be found here and there, and I am rather haunted just now by one of them, who is, it must be frankly admitted, a most unsavory specimen. But you must take these specimens as you can get them. Yet there are here and there, in odd corners and out-of-the-way holes, some few survivals of that almost extinct species whom I like to believe that the laureate had in mind when he foresaw the future of the world—a species which, for want of a better name, I must needs call individuals, because that other term, which used to be a favorite one with my grandmother, has somehow come to have a different meaning. Yes, there are still to be found certain human creatures who live, and talk, and dress, and stand about, and otherwise deport themselves, in a manner The name of this individual is Loafing which shocks and amazes the world, and Ben. That is his name, I repeat, for a who retain their individualism in spite of name is what a man or a thing is called all that popular opinion can do to discoun- by, and Loafing Ben answers to the appel tenance them. If they are rich, their relation which he has gained for himself bellion from established usages goes some way to create a new fashion, and the victrix causa of the many finding an obstacle in its onward course submits to swerve for a moment from its line of advance, in homage to some nineteenth-century Cato who can breast and turn the stream. just as a bishop who has won his mitre forgets his honored patronymic, which is henceforth wrapped up in lawn. Loafing Ben was born more than sixty years ago at Stratos, which everybody knows is in Arcadia; he has been tumbling about that blissful land ever since, living one of The very last time I was at Oxbridge I the oddest lives of any of my acquaintwas sauntering through one of the college ances. His parents were a pretty hardcourts, and my footsteps were arrested by working pair, strong, resolute, not to say a lovely spectacle such as I have not seen obstinate. They had never wandered five for many years. Outside the "sported" miles from the banks of Ladon's classic door of some college magnate for his stream. They had had a very hard name had Mr. before it on the lintel" broughtage up." They could not rethere stood three pairs of Wellington member, either of them, that they had ever boots, newly polished, and on the top of the boots a beautifully clean pile of magnificent stand-up collars with very long strings attached to them. None of your new-fangled buttons for that great man! Should he demean himself to buttons when he knew the virtue of tape? and for boots should he spoil the set of his trousers by the inelegant protuberances had any kindness shown them in word or deed by any human being during the seventy-six years which they had spent in this world when I first went to see them. They are not very refined in manners or sentiments. The first time I gave the old man a shilling, he looked as if he were a little afraid that I was going to enlist him in the queen's service. Ah! my brethren |