guanaco, ostrich, and wild horse; and beyond all in the west the stupendous mountain range of the Cordilleras - a realm of enchantment and ever-changing beauty. Very soon, however, when the novelty of the new life had worn off, together with the exultation he had experienced at his escape from cruel death, his heart began to be eaten up with secret grief, and he pined for his own people again. Escape was impossible; to have revealed his true feelings would have exposed him to in

to establish his identity. His relations had, however, been poor, and had long passed away, leaving nothing for him to inherit, so that there was no reason to discredit his strange story. He related that when the Indians drew him from the water and carried him back to the corral they disagreed amongst themselves as to what they should do to him. Luckily one of them understood Spanish, and translated to the others the substance of Damian's speech delivered from the water. When they questioned their captive hestant cruel death. To take kindly to the invented many other ingenious lies, saying that he was a poor orphan boy, and that the cruel treatment his master subjected him to had made him resolve to escape to the Indians. The only feeling he had towards his own race, he assured them, was one of undying animosity; and he was ready to vow that if they would only let him join their tribe he would always be ready for a raid on the Christian settlement. To see the entire white race swept away with fire and steel was, in fact, the cherished hope of his heart. Their savage breasts were touched with his piteous tale of sufferings; his revengeful feelings were believed to be genuine, and they took him to their own home, where he was permittted to share in the simple delights of the aborigines. They belonged to a tribe very powerful at that time, inhabiting a district called Las Manzanas—that is, the Apple Country-situated at the sources of the Rio Negro in the vicinity of the Andes.

There is a tradition that shortly after the conquest of South America a few courageous Jesuit priests crossed over from Chili to the eastern slopes of the Andes to preach Christianity to the tribes there, and that they took with them implements of husbandry, grain, and seeds of European fruits. The missionaries soon met their death, and all that remained of their labors among the heathen were a few apple-trees they had planted. These trees found a soil and climate so favorable, that they soon began to propagate spontaneously, becoming exceedingly abundant. Certain it is that now, after two or three centuries of neglect by man, these wild apple-trees still yield excellent fruit, which the Indians eat, and from which they also make a fermented liquor they call chi-chi.

To this far-off fertile region Damian was taken to lead the kind of life he professed to love. Here were hill, forest, and clear, swift river, great undulating plains, the pleasant pasture lands of the VOL. LI. 2628

LIVING AGE.

savage way of life, outwardly at least, was now his only course. With cheerful countenance he went forth on long hunting expeditions in the depth of winter, exposed all day to bitter cold and furious storms of wind and sleet, cursed and beaten for his awkwardness by his fellow. huntsmen; at night stretching his aching limbs on the wet, stony ground, with the rug they permitted him to wear for only covering. When the hunters were unlucky it was customary to slaughter a horse for food. The wretched animal would be first drawn up by its hind legs and suspended from the branches of a great tree, so that all the blood might be caught, for this is the chief delicacy of the Patagonian savage. An artery would be opened in the neck and the spouting blood caught in large earthen vessels; then, when the savages gathered round to the feast, poor Damian would be with them to drink his share of the abhorred liquid, hot from the heart of the still living brute. In autumn, when the apples were fermented in pits dug in the earth and lined with horse hides to prevent the juice from escaping, he would take part, as became a true savage, in the grand annual drinking-bouts. The women would first go round carefully gathering up all knives, spears, bolas, or other weapons dangerous in the hands of drunken men, to carry them away into the forest, where they would conceal themselves with the chil dren. Then for days the warriors would give themselves up to the joys of intoxication; and at such times unhappy Damian would come in for a large share of ridicule, blows, and execrations; the Indians being full of boisterous fun or else truculent in their cups, and loving above all things to have a "white fool for a butt.

At length, when he came to man's estate, was fluent in their language, and outwardly in all things like a savage, a wife was bestowed on him, and she bore him several children. Those he had first

their old home, she would still wait for him, vainly hoping, fearing much, dimeyed with sorrow and long watching, yet never seeing his form returning to her out of the mysterious haze of the desert. Poor Damian, and poor wife!

W. H. HUDSON.

From The Nineteenth Century.

A SWAIN OF ARCADY.

known as grown up or old men gradually died off, were killed, or drifted away; children who had always known Damian as one of the tribe grew to manhood, and it was forgotten that he had ever been a Christian and a captive. Yet still, with his helpmate by his side, weaving rugs and raiment for him or ministering to his wants for the Indian wife is always industrious and the patient, willing, affectionate slave of her lord - and with all his young barbarians at play on the grass before his hut, he would sit in the waning sunlight oppressed with sorrow, dreaming "The individual withers, and the world is more and the old dreams he could not banish from his heart. And at last, when his wife began to grow wrinkled and dark-skinned, as a middle-aged Indian mother invariably does, and when his children were becoming men, the gnawing discontent at his breast made him resolve to leave the tribe and the life he secretly hated. He joined a hunting party going towards the Atlantic coast, and after travelling for some days with them his opportunity came, when he secretly left them and made his way alone to the Carmen.

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more.'
""

It is half a century and more since our laureate wrote down that melancholy line. In those days there were no railways and no steamboats worth speaking of - there were parish pounds, and stocks, and stage coaches, and strong arms thrashed the corn out with the flail; and there were prize-fights, and duels, and lotteries, and cock-fighting, and a host of other picturesque institutions which people could delight themselves with almost as they pleased. The individual in those days "And there he is," concluded Ventura, had incomparably more liberty of a certain when he had told the story with undis-kind than he has now his speech and guised contempt for Damian in his tone, his dress" "bewrayed him. Different an Indian and nothing less! Does he parts of the country had their characterimagine he can ever be like one of us istic costumes, their characteristic diaafter living that life for thirty years? If lects, their local habits of life, methods of Marcos were alive, how he would laugh to tillage, even local eatables and drinkables; see Damian back again, sitting cross- and when a man rode from London to legged on the floor, solemn as a cacique, Exeter his eyes and ears were opened to brown as old leather, and calling himself sights and sounds very strange and starta white man! Yet here he says he will ling to the born Londoner, who in his turn remain, and here amongst Christians he in those days was an individual with pewill die. Fool, why did he not escape culiarities of his own. All this is going, twenty years ago, or, having remained so and has well nigh gone. The world is long in the desert, why has he now come more and more. The world has grown back where he is not wanted?" too big for us. We are being flattened by monstrous Juggernaut wheels, which roll over us all, and reduce us all to a smirky surface of dreary, dismal, dull dead-aliv ism, and the individual is withering, his individualism crushed out of him -unrecognizable as anything but a tiny portion of a mass.

Ventura was very unsympathetic, and appeared to have no kindly feelings left for his old companion-in-arms, but I was touched with the story I had heard. There was something pathetic in the life of that poor returned wanderer, an alien now to his own fellow-townsmen, home less amidst the pleasant vineyards, poplar "Look at this 'ere feller!" said an angroves, and old stone houses where he gry pig-jobber to me the other day, whom had first seen the light; listening to the I was trying to reconcile to my churchbells from the church tower as he had warden. "Ee don't know 'ow to write a listened to them in childhood, and perhaps letter- the feller calls me Mister Brown for the first time realizing in a dull, vague on his imvilope!" It really was too bad. kind of way that it might never more be For are we not all esquires? Yes; and with him as it had been in the vanished we all wear black coats, and dark trousers, past. Possibly also, the memory of his and "toppers,” at least in London, and savage spouse who had loved him many socks, and the same sort of boots, and years would add some bitterness to his London tailors come and bother us for orstrange, isolated life. For, far away inders and refuse to go away. And I am

told that the ladies' dressmakers make periodical journeys to Paris, and get the same patterns for the dresses, and the bonnets, and the well, the other things for all the ladies within the four seas; and they all look like one another, or try to look like one another, from the parson's daughter up to the celestials behind Spiers and Pond's counters, including that middle class which embraces the dairymaid and the duchess. Already the enterprising caterers for public amusement have been compelled to send to Japan to find a hundred queer-looking people, and I think the day cannot be far off when a museum will be opened at South Kensington for individuals who shall have survived the withering process, and whom the world shall have left out from its all-absorbing conglomerate.

of laces that might crack any moment, and hooks and eyes that might go off with a bang when it was least expected of them? What had boot-hooks been invented for, sir? And invented by a great duke, too, sir! Why, I defy a man to wear straps with your clumsy new-fangled high-lows!"

"

There used to be a large number of individuals at the universities some years ago; they are almost utterly extinct now. I remember, when I was a freshman, meeting one of them out hunting; he wore a garment over his coat which was called a spencer, and when it came on to a blow as we rode home together, he gravely checked his horse and tied a large cotton pocket-handkerchief over his hat and under his chin, saying to me in a cautious way, "I always carry a spare handkerchief to tie my hat on with when it's rough. It's a good hint for you, young man!" not ask him if he kept another for fastening his head on. Perhaps he managed that with his collar!

I did

Even in our country villages we are losing our individuals. The world is getting quite too much for us withering us, in fact. Nevertheless they are to be found here and there, and I am rather haunted just now by one of them, who is, it must be frankly admitted, a most unsavory specimen. But you must take these specimens as you can get them.

Yet there are here and there, in odd corners and out-of-the-way holes, some few survivals of that almost extinct species whom I like to believe that the laureate had in mind when he foresaw the future of the world-a species which, for want of a better name, I must needs call individuals, because that other term, which used to be a favorite one with my grandmother, has somehow come to have a different meaning. Yes, there are still to be found certain human creatures who live, and talk, and dress, and stand about, and otherwise deport themselves, in a manner The name of this individual is Loafing which shocks and amazes the world, and Ben. That is his name, I repeat, for a who retain their individualism in spite of name is what a man or a thing is called all that popular opinion can do to discoun- by, and Loafing Ben answers to the appeltenance them. If they are rich, their relation which he has gained for himself bellion from established usages goes some way to create a new fashion, and the victrix causa of the many finding an obstacle in its onward course submits to swerve for a moment from its line of advance, in homage to some nineteenth-century Cato who can breast and turn the stream.

just as a bishop who has won his mitre forgets his honored patronymic, which is henceforth wrapped up in lawn. Loafing Ben was born more than sixty years ago at Stratos, which everybody knows is in Arcadia; he has been tumbling about that blissful land ever since, living one of The very last time I was at Oxbridge I the oddest lives of any of my acquaintwas sauntering through one of the college ances. His parents were a pretty hardcourts, and my footsteps were arrested by working pair, strong, resolute, not to say a lovely spectacle such as I have not seen obstinate. They had never wandered five for many years. Outside the "sported "miles from the banks of Ladon's classic door of some college magnate for his stream. They had had a very hard name had Mr. before it on the lintel-"broughtage up." They could not rethere stood three pairs of Wellington member, either of them, that they had ever boots, newly polished, and on the top of the boots a beautifully clean pile of magnificent stand-up collars with very long strings attached to them. None of your new-fangled buttons for that great man! Should he demean himself to buttons when he knew the virtue of tape? and for boots should he spoil the set of his trousers by the inelegant protuberances

had any kindness shown them in word or deed by any human being during the seventy-six years which they had spent in this world when I first went to see them. They are not very refined in manners or sentiments. The first time I gave the old man a shilling, he looked as if he were a little afraid that I was going to enlist him in the queen's service. Ah! my brethren

were curious to know what it was all about. Ben took to reading "Robinson Crusoe" aloud, and became gradually a kind of local bard or scald, for he soon knew whole chapters of "Robinson Crusoe" by heart, and in the winter evenings the penny readings at the Green Man got a certain local reputation; and as Ben never had a farthing in his pocket-his parents took all his earnings, and he gave them up without protest the regular customers used to stand treat for many a half-pint in return for Ben's entertain. ment. So Ben got to love beer, and by

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away several gallons of it in the seven days of which the week was then com posed, even for the publican. By the time Ben had completed his nineteenth year he had become addicted to beer.

and sisters, there are some very odd corners in Arcady, and in Boeotia too for that matter, corners to which no sort of civilization had ever approached for centuries, till the compulsory Education Act sent the myrmidons of the law to rummage in the rat-holes. Ben's parents were practically heathens, and, like other heathens, were not very desirous of being anything else. But Ben's father sent him to school, and if he played truant his mother “layed on to him." Ben's boyhood was not a happy one. Stratos had a free school, which was warm in winter and not particularly hot in summer; the schoolmaster fair means or foul he contrived to put was not so heavy in the arm as some, and Ben, with less thwacking at school than was dealt out to him at home, absorbed a certain amount of knowledge and grew to be reckoned a sort of a scholar. Also he grew up to be immensely strong and a good six feet high, with the misfortune, however, of having something uncanny about his upper story from his early childhood. There is a legend that his father once made a bet that he would smash a green walnut with his fist upon Ben's head, and that he won his bet. I am inclined to think this cannot be quite true; nevertheless, like many another myth, there may be a germ of truth in the tradition. Perhaps it was not a green walnut. Be that as it may, it is admitted by all that Ben is not as other men are. He could acquire book-learning with facility, and if we are to believe his surviving schoolfellows, he had acquisitive powers quite sufficient to ensure him a double first at Cambridge, always provided that he could have stuck to anything.

Ben seems to have gone to work at ten or eleven, perhaps earlier; and as long as they liked it, and he did not object, father and mother used to "lay on to him." It was their habit, and Ben did not seem to care much. The three lived on amicably till the lad was eighteen, a brawny, lum. bering, powerful fellow, "fared as if he didn't care for nawthing," as they tell me. One day, when he was in his nineteenth year, more than forty years ago, some. body gave Ben a book. I never could make out the real facts of the case, but the book appears to have been "Robinson Crusoe." Ben took to reading the book at all sorts of times, and when father and mother turned him out of doors, as they frequently did, he used to shamble into the little public-house and skulk near the fire and read. To see a young man reading a book in the parlor of the Green Man in those days was a rarity, and folks

One day Ben vanished. The habitués of the Green Man were chagrined, but there was nothing to be done but drink the beer themselves which the missing bard had been wont to consume at their expense. Ben's parents were inconvenienced; there was less money for them to take and no one to pommel. Just as suddenly as he had vanished, after a six weeks' absence he appeared once more upon the scene, shambling, hulking, dirty, and ragged as ever, save that he turned up with a sailor's jersey and a portentous pair of boots. He had been to sea, had been very sea-sick, never held up his head without knocking it against something, had somehow been knocked down several times, and been pronounced a hopeless incompetent by the skipper, who sent him adrift as soon as he could land him. Where he had shipped himself, to what port he had sailed, whether he had been on a fishing voyage for herrings or gone to Sunderland for coals, or crossed the Channel in a Dutch galiot, no one ever could make out, and I am persuaded that Ben himself could never have told. All he knew was that he had been sea-sick, that he had got a jersey and a pair of boots, and lost his Robinson Crusoe. There was something else that he had gained by his cruise. His parents from this time ceased to "lay on to him." He had seen the world, and that awed them. But Ben never could rest at ease from henceforth, and became a loafer, and has continued to be a loafer from that day to the present hour. It is believed that he never changed his clothes, and never washed himself, never tasted any liquid but beer, nor any food but dry bread for years. No man for miles round, they say, could do a

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