From Cape Froward to and beyond the neighborhood of Sandy Point there are forests of beeches and other foliferous trees, and the hills and level ground back of them are covered with grass. Agriculture is limited, and the colonists who went to the Strait of Magellan to make homes and become rich have been sorely disappointed. The steamer anchored in front of the little town, and hardly had her anchor touched the bottom of the bay when a steam tender came alongside, bringing the captain of the port and the agent of the steamship company. Dr. Bronson and his nephew were invited to go ashore in the tender; they had made a bargain with a boatman, but, as the waves were dancing merrily in consequence of the brisk wind blowing down the strait, they accepted the invitation, and paid the owner of the boat for doing nothing. In a quarter of an hour they were landed at a little wooden pier, and had leisure to study the most southerly town of the western world. [Illustration: CHILIAN SETTLEMENT AT SANDY POINT.] "It didn't take us long to see the whole of Sandy Point," said Fred, in the account of their visit, "as the sights of the place can be exhausted in a very little while. There is a beach in front of a high ridge of hills, and some rising ground intervening between beach and hills. The town straggles along this beach, and back on the rising ground behind it; it consists of a fort, a church, some government barracks, a custom-house, and one or two other public buildings, together with a lot of one-story houses disposed in lines to form streets. It has a population of eight or nine hundred--possibly a thousand--and presents a woe-begone appearance, like that of a half-deserted village. "There were Germans, Swiss, French, and Italians among the people we met in the streets; the rest were Chilians and Patagonians, together with some Fuegians who had paddled over the strait from their native shores. The Europeans were much like the same people elsewhere, and we paid no particular attention to them; we were more interested in the Patagonians and Fuegians, and I prevailed upon some of them to stand to be sketched under promise of half a dollar each for their trouble. Their countenances are not prepossessing, and by no stretch of the imagination could they be called handsome. In fact, I consider them about the ugliest people I ever saw. [Illustration: PATAGONIAN DRESS.]