ACROSS THE ANDES 131 



tatives of these Araucanian Indians, all of them 

 now peaceable farmers and stock-growers, at 

 a town of twenty or thirty thousand people 

 where there was not a single white man to be 

 found a quarter of a century ago. Our party 

 included, among others, Major Shipton, U. S. A., 

 the military aide to our legation at Buenos 

 Ayres, my son Kermit, and several kind Chilean 

 friends. 



We reached our destination, Puerto Varas, 

 early in the morning. It stands on the shore 

 of a lovely lake. There has been a consider 

 able German settlement in middle and southern 

 Chile, and, as everywhere, the Germans have 

 made capital colonists. At Puerto Varas there 

 are two villages, mainly of Germans, one Prot 

 estant and the other Catholic. We were 

 made welcome and given breakfast in an inn 

 which, with its signs and pictures, might have 

 come from the Fatherland. Among the guests 

 at the breakfast, in addition to the native 

 Chilean Intendente, were three or four normal- 

 school teachers, all of them Germans and evi 

 dently uncommonly good teachers, too. There 

 were school-children, there were citizens of 

 every kind. Many of the Germans born abroad 

 could speak nothing but German. The chil 

 dren, however, spoke Spanish, and in some cases 



