178 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
then only 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 pricked 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 where to 
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 life 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 
