How loud the great frogs croaked and snored around the lodge, ay, and even in it; but their croaking and snoring never once wakened our pampas sportsmen!
Book Three—Chapter Three.
Here and There in Many Climes.
“Heaven speed the canvas gallantly unfurled,
To furnish and accommodate a world,
To give the pole the produce of the sun,
And knit unsocial climates into one.”
“The luxuries of seas and woods,
The airy joys of social solitude,
Famed each rude wanderer.”
Scenes: The shores of South America. The lonely isles of the Pacific, Antarctic Ocean, and Antarctic ice.
If my young reader took an ordinary sized map or chart of the world he could follow with eye or finger the route, en voyage, taken by our wanderers for the next few months, till we find them amid the lovely scenery briefly depicted above. Southwards along the eastern shore of South America, but keeping well to sea, and only seeing the wild romantic coast, now and then lying like a blue-grey storm-cloud on the horizon, sailed the Gloaming Star. Leaving the Falkland Islands on the port beam, they passed the Straits of Magellan, not venturing in them now; and reaching farther southward, after encountering a terrific gale of wind which tried the timbers of the bonny barque and the mettle of her gallant tars, after having narrowly escaped being crushed during a dismal fog by heavy ice, they succeeded in weathering the Cape, and stretched away north now, once more along a wild coast—its mountains towering to the moon—and after many, many dreary weeks at sea, they landed at the wonderful isle of Juan Fernandez, celebrated, as all know, for having been the prison isle of Alexander Selkirk, the hero of that best of boys’ books—“Robinson Crusoe.”
The hut was still there, and many another curious memento of the sailor hermit, and strange thoughts passed through the wanderers’ minds as they walked on the very beach where, according to Defoe, his hero had seen the footstep in the sands.