tamed, and are often kept till almost full-grown as pets. One settler, near Lake Argentino, lived alone with two threequarter grown pumas throughout the winter of 1901, in his little single roomed hut. A strange taste in companionship!

This article would not be complete without some mention of the Tehuelche methods of hunting. In former times they hunted on foot, as do the Onas to-day in Terra del Fuego, but since the introduction of the horse from the Auracanian tribes, whose country marches with that of the Tehuelches to the north-west, the latter now always hunt upon horseback.

The Tehuelches are a fine race, with large well-hewn features, their skin of a reddish brown; but though they still average six feet in stature, six feet in stature, they have noticeably deteriorated in physique, from their habit of riding on all occasions and everywhere. A man will not walk a hundred yards, but catches his horse and rides the distance. As far as the upper part of the body is concerned, the breadth of shoulder and great back and arm muscles demand admiration, but their lower limbs are disproportionately weak.

The Tehuelches, unlike most savage tribes, have never adopted the white man's weapons. I never 8&W an Indian with a firearm, though doubtless an odd revolver may find its way into their guanacoskin toldos. But for the purposes of the chase they use the

boleadores, and some of them are even so conservative as to retain the flint knife of prehistoric times. Boleadores used for the chase of guanaco or ostrich are loaded with balls of solid metal or with stones. Three such missiles, each the size of a tennis-ball, one being pear-shaped to fit the grasp of the hand, are sewn up in rawhide bags and fastened at the three points of a thong like a Y, two arms of which are four feet in length, the third longer. Seizing this weapon by the pear-shaped ball, which is at the single end of the Y, the Indian hunter, going at full gallop, whirls it round his head, letting it fly at the neck or legs of the ostrich or the guanaco that he may be chasing. The impact of the heavy balls balls will will often break the quarry's legs, or at any rate, in a few bounds or strides, entangle them in such a way as to bring it to the ground.

An organised day's hunt with the Tehuelches is an interesting function. The cacique or chief arranges the plans, having first made sure of the neighbourhood of large herds of guanaco, which form the staple of the game to be secured. The hunters ride off in couples, each with a led horse in addition to the one he is riding, and accompanied by six or eight gaunt hounds that still betray in some degree their greyhound ancestry. They are mostly too light to be able to pull down a full-grown buck, but against ostriches and young guanaco they are very serviceable.

Maurice merrily opened up the subject again that evening at the dinner-table.

For two of the human arts alone had Captain Cutlass something like like contemptthat of the cook and of the lapidary. Unhappy men, he argued playfully with Maurice, developed a new palate by resorting to pungent spices, piquant flavours, high-savoured, hot, bitter, and even putrid things, when they had exhausted the old one which delighted only in the simplest foods. In the plain and natural life of the forester or the seaman, all that the body craved was in half a dozen edibles, to be found with ease wherever fortune took him. Set the clubman and the gourmet before a dinner of herbs, salt junk, or oatmeal cakes, and he should be wretched, since he had bought his discrimination in kickshaws, curries, and wines at the cost of a simple palate ruined. Both seaman and gourmet sought but to gratify a natural hunger; that it should be gratified was the main thing, and considering the cheapness and accessibility of the seaman's fare as compared with the gourmet's, who, he asked, should deny that the sailor had the best of it?

"We will now have your favourite strawberry trifle, Andy," innocently intimated Aunt Amelia, who had imperfectly got the drift of his remarks; and everybody laughed, including himself, at the unconscious retort, for in truth his sailor palate always watered

like a boy's to sweets and trifles.

"There have always been strawberry trifles, praise the Lord!" he said. "I was thinking of peacocks' tongues and ortolans, olives, truffles, caviare, and rotten cheese. The hunger of the workaday world has always been satisfied by commoner stuff, at which the gourmet is apt to sneer, and which, like bread and milk, has never gone out of fashion; while peacocks' tongues, and the monstrous salads of Lucullus, have long had their day, and now create a nausea to recall. Eh? I'm all for the old earth flavours: to the devil with your sauces and cruet bottles!"

"Andy!" exclaimed his aunt, whose ear was always marvellously quick for an impropriety.

"Well, well," he amended genially, "I withdraw the sauces; let him have the cruet bottle."

"I believe in a Good Table," said his aunt, as solemnly as if it were the opening of the Creed.

"So do I!" he answered gaily.

"I sometimes think you don't believe in anything that's natural and nice," said his aunt. "You have talked of the sin of jewels till you have made even Norah stop wearing any!"

He looked at his cousin with surprise; he had never noticed that she had lately fallen in, apparently, with his views in respect to jewels; she flushed, and he recognised immediately that the change betokened no

capitulation, but a sacrifice in the interest of Penelope.

"Norah," he said, taking up a glass of water, "I drink to you! I've never seen you look more charming. You confirm my belief that gold is only good for making into sovereigns, and that diamonds are rather vulgar bits of glass. No jewels you ever wore became you so well as this, their absence. It is not for any actual beauty in them women cherish jewels, since the meanest flower of the ditch is much more beautiful than anything that ever came from the hands of the goldsmith or the lapidary, but for vanity, avarice, and display; too often, I'm afraid, to rouse the covetousness of other women. No woman was ever better or more beautiful for a necklet or tiara-useless and barbaric things. . . . Don't you think so, Pen?"

He shot the question at her over the dinner-table, and her hand instinctively went up to the string of little amber beads upon her neck as if he were to snatch them from her.

"I don't know," she said with hesitation. "I like to see jewels - on other people. I suppose they're not more useless and barbaric than a lot of other things that women delight in men too. Whether they're good or bad, barbaric or beautiful, depends, I fancy, on the way we think of them!"

dandelion, or this orange, and a drop of dew, for in them there is the destiny of ourselves-brief life, a little of the sun, and then-Phew!" He popped a part of the orange in his his mouth and gulped like an all-devouring Providence. "I can't get into the soul of minerals and metals," he proceeded, "except good, honest coal-the fire in it, you understand, eh?—and the old dead summers, and the primeval forest, and the tiger burning bright, and the flame waiting, waiting, waiting, buried in the bowels of the earth. Now, I can be a flower”

"Oh, you are perfectly ridiculous, Andy!" said his aunt. "I wish, instead of being a flower, you would be sensible.”

"No, dear aunt," he said with a laugh, "it's a jolly sight better fun to be a flower. Eh? I can be a flower, if I look long enough at one, and I've looked at rose and guessed all its feelings till my heart was almost breaking, to think that together, the rose and I, we should have that strange heat in us, and be so wonderful and weak, and bud, and grow, and bloom, and perish, except in the mind of that inscrutable skyey Gardener. Eh? But I never could be a diamond brooch ; there's nothing of me in it,no human touch or tingle, no juice, no sense of tears, as in the commonest vegetable."

"As the onion," broke in Maurice with his usual flippancy. "Diamonds are what you make of them in your