A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open

As the great chain of the Andes stretches southward its altitude grows less, and the mountain wall is here and there broken by passes. When the time came for me to leave Chile I determined to cross the Andes by the easiest and most accessible and one of the most beautiful of these comparatively low passes. At the other end of the pass, on the Argentine or Patagonian side, we were to be met by motorcars, sent thither by my considerate hosts, the governmental authorities of Argentina.

From Santiago we went south by rail to Puerto Varas. The railway passed through the wide, rolling agricultural country of central Chile, a country of farms and prosperous towns. As we went southward we found ourselves in a land which was new in the sense that our own West is new. Middle and southern Chile were in the hands of the Indians but a short while since. We were met by fine-looking representatives of these Araucanian Indians, all of them now peaceable farmers and stock-growers, at a town of twenty or thirty thousand people where there was not a single white man to be found a quarter of a century ago. Our party included, among others, Major Shipton, U. S. A., the military aide to our legation at Buenos Aires, my son Kermit, and several kind Chilean friends.