I can never understand why "Yerba mate," or Paraguayan tea, has never become popular in England. It is prepared from the leaves of the ilex, and is strongly aromatic and very stimulating. I am myself exceedingly fond of it. Its lack of popularity may be due to the fact that it cannot be drunk in a cup, but must be sucked from a gourd through a perforated tube. It can (like most other things) be bought in London, if you know where to go to.
At Buenos Ayres I was quite sorry to part with the laughing, lanky Australian lad who had been such a pleasant travelling companion, and who seemed able to do anything he liked with his arms and legs. I expect that he could have done most things with his brains too, had he ever given them a chance. Howard's great merit was that he took things as they came, and never grumbled at the discomforts and minor hardships one must expect in a primitive country like Paraguay. Our tastes as regards wild things (with the possible exception of snakes) rather seemed to coincide, and, neither of us being town-bred, we did not object to rather elementary conditions.
I will own that I was immensely gratified at receiving an overseas letter some eight years later from Dick, telling me that he was married and had a little daughter, and asking me to stand godfather for his first child.
My blue satin bedroom looked more ridiculously incongruous than ever after the conditions to which I had been used at Patiño Cué.
The River Plate is over twenty miles broad at Buenos Ayres, and it is not easy to realise that this great expansive is all fresh water. The "Great Silver River" is, however, very shallow, except in mid-channel. Some twenty-five miles from the city it forms on its southern bank a great archipelago of wooded islands interspersed with hundreds of winding channels, some of them deep enough to carry ocean-going steamers. This is known as the Tigre, and its shady tree-lined waterways are a great resort during the sweltering heat of an Argentine summer. It is the most ideal place for boating, and boasts a very flourishing English Rowing Club, with a large fleet of light Thames-built boats. Here during the summer months I took the roughest of rough bungalows, with two English friends. The three-roomed shanty was raised on high piles, out of reach of floods, and looked exactly like the fishermen's houses one sees lining the rivers in native villages in the Malay States. During the intense heat of January the great delight of life at the Tigre was the midnight swim in the river before turning in. The Tigre is too far south for the alligators, biting-fish, electric rays (I allude to fish; not to beams of light), or other water-pests which Nature has lavished on the tropics in order to counteract their irresistible charm—and to prevent the whole world from settling down there. The water of the Tigre was so warm that one could remain in it over an hour. One mental picture I am always able to conjure up, and I can at will imagine myself at midnight paddling lazily down-stream on my back through the milk-warm water, in the scented dusk, looking up at the pattern formed by the leaves of the overhanging trees against the night sky; a pattern of black lace-work against the polished silver of the Southern moonlight, whilst the water lapped gently against the banks, and an immense joy at being alive filled one's heart.
I went straight from Buenos Ayres to Canada on a tramp steamer, and a month after leaving the Plate found myself in the backwoods of the Province of Quebec, on a short but very famous river running into the Bay of Chaleurs, probably the finest salmon river in the world, and I was fortunate enough to hook and to land a 28 lb. salmon before I had been there one hour. No greater contrast in surroundings can be imagined. In the place of the dead-flat, treeless levels of Southern Argentina, there were dense woods of spruce, cedar, and var, climbing the hills as far as the eye could see. Instead of the superficially courteous Argentine gaucho, with his air of half-concealed contempt for the "Gringo," and the ever-ready knife, prepared to leap from his waist-belt at the slightest provocation, there were the blunt, outspoken, hearty Canadian canoe-men, all of them lumbermen during the winter months. The fishing was ideal, and the fish ran uniformly large and fought like Trojans in the heavy water, but, unfortunately, every single winged insect on the North American Continent had arranged for a summer holiday on this same river at the same time. There they all were in their myriads; black-flies, sand-flies, and mosquitoes, all enjoying themselves tremendously. By day one was devoured by black-flies, who drew blood every time they bit. At nightfall the black-flies very considerately retired to rest, and the little sand-flies took their place. The mosquitoes took no rest whatever. These rollicking insects were always ready to turn night into day, or day into night, indiscriminately, provided there were some succulent humans to feed on. A net will baffle the mosquito, but for the sand-flies the only effective remedy was a "smudge" burning in an iron pail. A "smudge" is a fire of damp fir bark, which smoulders but does not blaze. It also emits huge volumes of smoke. We dined every night in an atmosphere denser than a thick London fog, and the coughing was such that a chance visitor would have imagined that he had strayed into a sanatorium for tuberculosis.
Things are done expeditiously in Canada. The ground had been cleared, the wooden house in which we lived erected, and the rough track through the forest made, all in eight weeks.
No one who has not tried it can have any idea of the intense cold of the water in these short Canadian rivers. Their course is so short, and they are so overhung with fir trees, that the fierce rays of a Canadian summer sun hardly touch them, so the water remains about ten degrees above freezing point. It would have been impossible to swim our river. Even a short dip of half a minute left one with gasping breath and chattering teeth.
I was surprised to find, too, that a Canadian forest is far more impenetrable than a tropical one. Here, the fallen trees and decay of countless centuries have formed a thick crust some two or three feet above the real soil. This moss-grown crust yields to the weight of a man and lets him through, so walking becomes infinitely difficult, and practically impossible. To extricate yourself at every step from three feet of decaying rubbish is very exhausting. In the tropics, that great forcing-house, this decaying vegetable matter would have given life to new and exuberant growths; but not so in Canada, frost-bound for four months of the twelve. Two-foot-wide tracks had been cut through the forest along the river, and the trees there were "blazed" (i.e., notched, so as to show up white where the bark had been hacked off), to indicate the direction of the trails; otherwise it would have been impossible to make one's way through the débris of a thousand years for more than a few yards.
I never saw such a wealth of wild fruit as on the banks of this Canadian stream. Wild strawberries and raspberries grew in such profusion that a bucketful of each could be filled in half an hour.