36 Ldle Days in Patagonia. 
festation of the intelligent life and power that is in 
all things. 
The river has 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 hue 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- 
