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Show BY PATH AND TKAIL. 73 a guilty soul overcome with helplessness and shook with nameless horror. There are those now living in this forbidding peninsu la who have dared and conquered the burning heat and trackless sands of lonely wastes, only to encounter, when they reached their goal of hope in the mountains, spec tres of the imagination and the wraiths of disordered senses. Of these was Antonio Gallego, a physical wreck, who was pointed out to me shuffling across the plazuela in the town of San Eafael. He was a fine, manly fellow in his day, earning a fair wage in the Eothschild smelter, when he took the mine fever and started for the mountains on a prospecting ex pedition. He was all alone, carrying his pick and shovel, water and food. A good deal of desultory wandering took him finally into a little canyon where he found a promising " outcropping, " and he went to work to locate a claim. It was a desolate place, but beautiful in a way. On either side of the valley that formed the bosom of the canyon, the mountain sloped up and up, until the purple tops merged into the blue sky, while on the rock and granite- strewn acclivity no vegetation took root. No game existed there; the very birds never flew across the place, and it was so sheltered from currents of air that even the winds had no voice. This dreadful and unnatural stillness was the first thing that impressed itself upon Gallego. Particularly at night time, when the stars glittering and scintillating as they always seem in these solitudes, jeweled the sky, he would sit at the open door of" his hut, and the silence would be so vast and pro found that the beating of his own heart would drum in his ear like the strokes of a trip- hammer. He was not a man of weird imagination, but unconsciously and grad- |