At Last, Patagonia / - 
delicious with a faint familiar perfume. Casting my 
eyes down I perceived, growing in the sand at my 
feet, an evening primrose plant, with at least a score 
ofopen blossoms on its low wide-spreading branches ; 
and this, my favourite flower, both in gardens and 
growing wild, was the sweet perfumer of the wilder- 
ness! Its subtle fragrance, first and last, has been 
much to me, and has followed me from the New 
World to the Old, to serve sometimes as a kind 
of second more faithful memory, and to set my 
brains working on a pretty problem, to which I 
shall devote a chapter at the end of this book. 
Our survey concluded, we set out in the direction 
of the Rio Negro. Before quitting the steamer the 
captain had spoken a few words to us. Looking at 
us as though he saw us not, he said that the ship had 
gone ashore somewhere north of the Rio Negro, 
about thirty miles he thought, and that we should 
doubtless find some herdsmen’s huts on our way 
thither. No need then to burden ourselves with 
food and drink! At first we kept close to the dunes 
that bordered the seashore, wading through a 
luxuriant growth of wild liquorice—a pretty plant 
about eighteen inches high, with deep green feathery 
foliage crowned with spikes of pale blue flowers. 
Some of the roots which we pulled up from the 
loose sandy soil were over nine feet in length. All 
the apothecaries in the world might have laid in a 
few years’ supply of the drug from the plants we saw 
on that morning. 
‘To my mind there is nothing in life so delightful 
