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, 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 saw 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 the ostrich or the guanaco that he may be chasing. The impact of the heavy balls 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.

The hunters form a huge circle, perhaps of some fifty miles, and drive the game inwards, lighting fires on the edge of the circle to mark out their positions, and partly to keep the wild animals from breaking back. As the ring of men draws in, the frightened game crowd together in the middle of it. There may be as many as two or three hundred guanaco, many ostriches, and even puma. Captain Musters saw two pumas killed in such a hunt. The guanaco bucks show spirit, and stamp and neigh defiance in front of their herds. As soon as the Indians have approached sufficiently near, they mount their fresh horses and gallop at full speed in upon the startled game. The yells of

the hunters, the flying boleadores, the dogs and horses in fierce pursuit after the frenzied animals, all go to make up a scene of extraordinary excitement.

The game breaks in every direction, and the Tehuelches follow for leagues over the wide pampa, their nimblefooted horses covering the most difficult ground-steep, stony slopes, or thickly-bushed levels -with astonishing accuracy. A large quantity of game is killed, much meat is secured, and in addition the feathers of the ostriches. The pelts of young guanaco, tendons, meat, &c., are all collected for their various uses, and carried back to the toldos, where a feast takes place amid amid general rejoicing.

CAPTAIN CUTLASS laughed immoderately when Norah met him that afternoon returning from a cavalry charge against the dolours, and told him how Penelope had made the artist in affected ecstasies look like a boy found surreptitiously playing with a doll. "You ought to have seen poor Reggie!" she exclaimed; "I never 8&w a pinker poet. First, he tried to make out that his melancholy had been got in another ruined priory, and that he had only borrowed the name of Pen's Ardfillan for the sake of its associations. Pen declared that such poetic licence was a crime; it was no better than to write an elegy and then go out to murder a man to fit it. Then he said the origin of a poet's emotion did not matter, so long as it was fervent and articulate. 'You're pretending to be very anxious to justify your poem, but really that's not what is troubling you,' said Pen. 'You're vexed that I found you fibbing.'"

"H'm," said Sir Andrew, clouding slightly, "I don't like that. You wouldn't have said that. It suggests that cursed sentiment, self-righteousness.'

should have heard her say fibbing,' it sounded like a word that meant a compound fracture of the ten commandments."

"I should have expected a little more sympathy with the bard from you," said Sir Andrew, sorry for the bard's discomfiture.

She blushed, and bit her nether lip. "Am I unkind?" she asked anxiously. "I shouldn't laugh at it if I didn't think it was for his good. Reggie's poetry is full of stylish affectations, and the very faults that Pen discovered in a twinkling. I often wanted to tell him so, but never had the courage. That's one result of being brought up in an atmosphere of conventional good manners, we are nearly always fibbers to our friends. There was positively nothing rude in what Pen said to him: she did not seem to be blaming him so much as protecting herself from contact with ideals not quite decent. And as for Reggie, -oh, Reggie doesn't care! He has the practice and belief of so many poets to back him up in a theory that Art is only an ingenious makebelieve."

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 disorimination 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 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.'