THE GOLD-DIGGINGS OF CAPE HORN.* THE book before us is

the genuine outcome of that untamed longing for adventure and hatred of the restraints of civilisa- tion which, apart from the battle for a living, is leading so many farther and farther a-field, to escape from the awful advertisements of quack medicines and prepared foods which are nowadays the staple of domestic scenery. Indeed it is to those who " have an unrestrainable longing for wild adventure, with the possibility of suddenly acquiring riches thrown in as an incentive to endurance," that Mr. Spears's work is specially addressed, with an exhortation to pack their outfits and hasten away to the region lying between Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan to dig for gold. A later part of the volume will be a warning to loving friends and relatives of the inevitable result to be anticipated from devoting a son to these wild pursuits :-

" I saw half-a-dozen sheep-men in Gallegas. They had come to the settlement partly on business and partly for the pleasures of society. With a dozen villagers they were seated at a large table in the dining-room of one of the hotels. A huge kerosene-lamp overhead afforded fair light—enough at least to show that the crowd was unshaved, unwashed, and squalid. Each man had a tumbler at his elbow. A fat, round bottle that held about a gallon of claret was passed along at frequent intervals to keep the tumblers full. All but one were drinking wine. The excep- tion was an Englishman, and he took whisky. Half the crowd were playing cards, and there were kernels of corn in little heaps as chips before each player. 'This is a great game,' said Mr. William Clark, formerly of Salem, Mass., a ranchman who acted • The Gold-lnycinge of Cnpe Horn a Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, By John R. Spears. London and Now York : Putnam,. 1st*. as my guide. You play it, eh? Of course you do. Why, man,. they've only corn for chips, but they are winning and losing a hundred dollars and more every game.'—' So ? To judge from their dress they couldn't afford to lose fifty cents.'—' Of course they couldn't, but they're rich—most of them. Each red kernel is a dollar chip, each white one twenty-five cents. This is a great country.'—' So it is. Is that old fellow with a ragged shirt.

at the head of the table one of the rich ones ? You bet he is. Ragged, eh ? Well, rather ; but he's the proprietor of this hotel, and owns ten thousand sheep besides!—' And the swarthy old

pirate alongside with the big heap of reds, who's he ? You call him a pirate ? How did you find it out ? That's just what he is. He lent me a hundred not long ago. and charged me two per cent. a month. He's the Government blacksmith. He only gets $30 a month, but he has hundreds of dollars loaned out at two per cent. a month. Big pile of reds, eh? You call him a. pirate ? That's just what he is.' On further inquiry I learned that three men playing at the table with the landlord had incomes better than $2,000 gold a year, while the rest were employes on wages paid in paper, the best-dressed man being a servant on $20 a month. Four had been well-educated, and two could barely read. Apparently they were all enjoying themselves, and I asked Clark if they were. He looked at me in astonishment. Why, man, of course they are. What more could you want ?' he said. The sheep-man does not want anything more.'"

So complete is the sheep-man's contentment with his lot that, with the exception of two brothers near Santa Cruz, the writer met with no man living amongst his sheep who ever wished to leave them. Almost to a man educated, and by their youthful training refined, and some of them University men,.

they live lives that to people of culture and refinement seem, utterly savage, but become so accustomed to it that they can

endure no other. One man sold his holdings in Patagonia for £26,000 and went home to England with his wife to enjoy

himself. They had lived on their holding but for a few years, but life in a mud but had so changed them that they could no- longer consort with their old friends :—

" To keep her house clean and herself was a burden for the wife, even when she had servants to help her ; to wash and shave and wear a starched collar made life intolerable for the husband. The latent wild instinct in both had asserted itself until it was beyond control, and they returned with joy to the savage freedom of the desert."

We were certainly not aware that life on the ranches meant the abjuring of all ablution, but the instincts of men are, with all respect to Mr. Spears, of a very different order in different people. There is no finer poem in modern literature, or one which pierces more deeply into the curious recesses of the dis- contented and restless heart of humanity, than the famous Canto Notturno " of Leopardi, in which the solitary shepherd on the mountains meditates on the weary problem. of life, and bewails the hopeless monotony of the existence of which that which Mr. Spears describes is but another form.. But to him the desert is a strange region, "forever bleak, barren, and monotonous to the eye. With its piercing winds. and blizzards on the one hand, and its fierce beats and thirsty wastes on the other, it is apparently the most in- hospitable region in the world. But it takes hold of the heartstrings of men, strips off their thin veneer of civilisa- tion, teaches them joys of which they had heard only such faint rumours as may come in dreams, and so holds them fast." We could ourselves wish to remind the writer that it is quite the newest coating of veneer which turns " for ever" into a monosyllable, as Calverley tells us :—

" Forever ! 'tis a single word,—

Our rude forefathers deemed it two : Can you imagine so absurd A view ? "

But surely the conclusion to be drawn from such speculations is a strange one. On the one hand, we are presented with a picture of refined and cultivated University men discovering for themselves a new part of the world in which they may plunge back by choice into the primitive life of the savage ;

while on the other we find, in another distant region, another set of the same class and type doing their best, with the aid of the share-market and the Maxim guns, to force upon the unwilling savage those very blessings of civilisation which their brothers are engaged in renouncing. And the police- court in Bow Street seems a kind of final resort to which everybody is liable, while the cricketers play their matches, and the golfers introduce their links, equally in the fields of peace and war. Whither does it all tend ?

The lover of wild sports, however, will find no such draw- back as these speculations bring, in a book which is full of observation and record of the strange adventurous life which the writer's favourite heroes lead. The chase of a coyote ov

an antelope or deer across the Colorado plains is contrasted with the hunting on Long Island or the chase of the old Southern planter after the red-fox—we had forgotten to mention that the author of this book is an American of the Americans—but the crown of delight is assigned to the race for the life of an old cock•ostrich:-

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With both wings drooping if he be at the south, but with one up and spread like a great sail if he be at the north, he stretches out his neck and flees away. The sportsman has no need to urge a well-broken desert horse,—it will turn into the hot trail and stretch out in pursuit, till the speed sends a gale whistling past the ears of the rider, and the dust from his heels lingers above the mesa like the smoke from a flying express."

The bird spreads his wings and jumps over a precipice where a fall means certain death to the rider, and the lasso has to be loosened from the sportsman's waist when the bird is overtaken, as it is never to be shot down. The ostrich can swim, but not in cold water, where it gets so numb that the Indians take advantage of it to drive the bird there in hot weather; and such is the excitement of the hunt that it is known among the Gauchos as " the wild mirth of the desert." The account of the varieties of hunting which follows, such as of the tinamon, is vivid if cruel, and we learn that the super- stition concerning the albatross is modern, Captain Cook's crew having preferred it to any other meat. The panther, " a fine savage who kills for fun," is another of Mr. Spears's heroes, no living being in the desert, except man, escaping its appetite for murder. It kills the ostrich on his nest, crushes the shell of the armadillo, and digs out the mouse from the grass.

We can do little more than dip into this book of strange adventure, and must advise the reader to study for himself the account of the country of the Yahgans, according to Captain Cook, the most savage he had seen, and according to Admiral Anson, "the most horrible country which it was possible to conceive!' Mr. Spears describes its inhabitants as one of the most interesting and unfortunate of Indian tribes, interesting from their very remarkable qualities of mind and body, un- fortunate " because they have been almost exterminated by change in their habits, wrought by Christian missionaries." Amongst other matters they have been taught to dress in flannel instead of grease, and have consequently perished of cold. It is rather like a chapter in Swift, the whole thing, with a horrid kind of irony of its own. One leaves the book, as Captain Younghusband left the tribe who thought the world bounded by its own mountains, with a quiet wonder, as

the patient stars look down," what they all think about it. Now that the Italians and " Dr. Jim" have stirred up the whole aboriginal problem anew, we can commend Mr. Spears and his ethics to fresh consideration.