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Show CHAPTEE X. THE FIGHT FOB LIFE. Don Estaban Guiteras did me the kindness to accept an invitation to dine with me this evening and pay me a parting visit, for I leave Bnena Vista to- morrow, and may never again tread its hospitable streets. He ac companied me, after dinner, to my hotel room, and after opening a bottle of Zara Maraschino and lighting our cigars, I induced him to continue the conversation along the lines traced out the evening I was his guest. He spoke of beds of lakes on mountains 4,000 feet above the sea, and of fossil and petrified skeletons of strange fish and animals found in the beds ; of the singular habit of the desert rat which, when about to die, climbs the mesquite tree and prepares its own grave in the crotch; of the desert ants, which build mounds miles apart in tEe desert and open an underground tunnel between them. He told of the migration of ants to the moun tains, the military precision of their movements on the march, their racapity, the blight of all vegetable life after the myriad hosts had passed, and of the red and black ants and their fierce and exterminating battles. He referred to the strange ways of the " side winder," or desert rattle snake, of the wisdom of lizards and other reptiles, and of animals living and dying on the great ocean of sand, and of the skeletons of men who went mad and died alone on the wilderness of desola tion. |