98 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



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 Bosario and Buenos 

 Ayres clocks stopped, and a slight shock was also 

 experienced in the Carmen on the Eio 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 impor- 

 tuned him to tell some of his early experiences in 

 the settlement. But somehow he invariably drifted 

 into amorous and gambling reminiscences, inter- 

 esting 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 



