210 RAMBLES AFTER SPORT. 



a brace of men, and tlie holiday of nuestra senora Santa 

 Somebody beheld us sailing with, a fair breeze out of the 

 harbour to make an offing for the Congreos. A Chile 

 surf boat is shaped exactly like a slice of melon, sharp at 

 both ends ; it is quite impossible to upset them, they go 

 through any sea, and are invariably steered by an oar 

 trailing over the stern. The Chileno fleteros are as fine 

 a body of men as there are in the world, and I always 

 found them exceedingly obliging when treated properly. 

 We carried the breeze all the way down, and by the time 

 the sun got well up out of the sea we were off our destina- 

 tion. We tacked and put into a small bay, with a lovely 

 shelving beach, and hauled up the boat. We had landed 

 in the most romantic little spot conceivable, and we 

 might have been primeval voyageiirs. What tremendous 

 convulsions of the whole coast must have taken place to 

 tumble and hurl such enormous masses of rock in confu- 

 sion worse confounded, such as we gazed upon ! Some 

 wild goats were crawling about the sides of the preci- 

 pices, looking from where we were like insects more 

 than animals, and a few large lizards were lying at 

 the mouths of their holes, basking in the morning sun, 

 all aflame like coils of brass. I captured one immense 

 fellow, quite a foot long, by inserting a stick down 

 a crevice; the lizard immediately laid hold of it, and 

 was drawn out, but I let him go again, as I had no means 

 of preserving him. The first rains had just fallen, and 

 the whole surface of the ground — even the beach and 

 rocks — was covered with flowers. A little blue convol- 

 vulus of the most extreme delicacy, aptly termed " sighs,'^ 

 carpeted the earth like a firmament, while out of the 

 enormous masses of gneiss and trap sprang cactus and 

 prickly pears. Here and there the Chile nettle patched 



