254 JOURNAL. 
learn,— but at Lastra’s making it. However, I went up to him and 
gave him my hand, and desired he would come to see me in San- 
tiago, like himself, after the 18th. This restored us to our ordinary 
state of cheerfulness, and the rest of the evening was occupied in 
giving and receiving details concerning the wanderer’s life. He had 
been taken in arms for Carrera, and imprisoned — and the prison in 
Chile is cruel. He had escaped, and was consequently outlawed. For 
years he has lived in the desert ; now and then entering the town in 
the disguise of a common peon, to hear of his friends, or to obtain 
some assistance from them; sometimes living in villages where he 
was unknown ; and then hastily escaping those who had discovered 
his retreat, and sought to betray him; and occasionally, as now, 
venturing from hiding-places in the woods at nightfall to sup with 
his friends, but retiring without sleeping. At one time he had been 
so long exposed to the damp in the rainy season, that he was laid up 
with rheumatism for two months in a cave; and had it not been for 
the fidelity of a little boy who brought him food daily, he must have 
perished : and this was the exile’s life. And thus years have passed 
of the life of one of the best educated, most accomplished young 
men in Chile! When we separated for the night, I felt sorry that 
we were to leave the hacienda of Salinas in the morning, without 
at this time knowing more of the tonto. * 
September 11th. — We left the hacienda of Salinas in a thick drizz- 
ling fog to ride to Melipilla, one of the chief towns of Chile, about 
twenty leagues from l’Angostura de Paine. Wecrossed the river at a 
beautiful spot, where the branch from the pass receives another equal 
in depth and clearness, and which I imagine to be the Paine itself. 
They meet in a little grassy plain, where there are some very fine 
timber trees scattered irregularly, and bounded to the north by the 
fences of the magnificent corn-fields of Viluco. The fog shut out all 
the mountains, and whatever is peculiar in the landscape of Chile ; 
* Before I left Chile, I had the pleasure of shaking hands with him, — restored to his 
family and friends. 
