178 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



then onl}" in the middle of his long, difficult, and 

 painful apprenticeship. It was curious and pitiful, 

 he says, to see the little Indian children in the 

 Chaco, when their skins were yet tender, stealing 

 away from their mother, and trying to follow the 

 larger ones playing at a distance. At every step 

 they would fall, and get loricked with thorns or cut 

 with sharp-edged rushes, and tangled in the 

 creepers, and hurt and crying they would struggle 

 on, and in this painful manner learn at last whereto 

 set their feet. 



The snake on the ground, coloured like the ground, 

 and shaped like the dead curved sticks or vines seen 

 everywhere on the ground, and motionless like the 

 vine, does not more closely assimilate to its sur- 

 roundings than birds in trees often do — the birds 

 which the Indian must also see. A stranger in 

 these regions, even the naturalist with a sight 

 quickened by enthusiasm, finds it hard to detect a 

 parrot in a lofty tree, even when he knows that 

 parrots are there ; for their greenness in the green 

 foliage, and the correlated habit they possess of re- 

 maining silent and motionless in the presence of an 

 intruder, make them invisible to him, and he is as- 

 tonished that the Indian should be able to detect 

 them. The Indian knows how to look for them ; it is 

 his trade, which is long to learn ; but he is obliged to 

 learn it, for his success in life, and even hfe itself, 

 depends on it, since in the savage state Nature kills 

 those who fail in her competitive examinations. 

 The reader has doubtless often seen those little 



