36 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



festation of the intelligent life and power that is in 

 all things. 



The river lias its turbid days, although few and 

 far between. One morning, on going down to the 

 water, I was astonished to find it no longer the 

 lovely line of the previous evening, but dull red- 

 red with the red earth that some swollen tributary 

 hundreds of miles to the west had poured into its 

 current. This change lasts only a day or two, after 

 which the river runs green and pure again. 



The valley at the end of a long hot windy 

 summer had an excessively dry and barren appear- 

 ance. The country, I was told, had suffered from 

 scarcity of rain for three years : at some points 

 even the roots of the dry dead grass had been blown 

 away, and when the wind was strong a cloud of 

 yellow dust hung all day over the valley. In such 

 places sheep were dying of starvation : cattle and 

 horses fared better, as they went out into the 

 uplands to browse on the bushes. The valley soil 

 is thin, being principally sand and gravel, with a 

 slight admixture of vegetable mould; and its 

 original vegetation was made up of coarse peren- 

 nial grasses, herbaceous shrubs and rushes : the 

 domestic cattle introduced by the white settlers 

 destroyed these slow-growing grasses and plants, 

 and, as has happened in most temperate regions of 

 the globe colonized by Europeans, the sweet, quick- 

 growing, short-lived grasses and clovers of the Old 

 World sprang up and occupied the soil. Here, 

 however, owing to its poverty, the excessive dry- 



