As a soldier the Chillano is brave to recklessness, and a sense of fear is unknown to him. He will not endure a siege, nor can he be made to fight at long range; but as soon as he sees the enemy he fires one volley, drops his gun, and rushes in with his curvo. His endurance is as great as his courage, and no North American Indian can travel so far without rest or go so long without food and water as the Chillano peon, or _roto_, as the mixed race is called. As the cholo in Peru is the descendant of the Spaniards and the Incas, so is the roto in Chili the child of the Spaniards and the Araucanian Indians, the race of giants with which the early explorers reported that Patagonia was peopled--“Menne of that bigginess,” as Sir Francis Drake reported, “that it seemed the trees of the forests were uprooted and were moving away.” They have the Spanish tenacity of purpose, the Indian endurance, and the cruelty of both. Each soldier, in the mountains or the desert, carries on his breast two buckskin bags. In one are the leaves of the coca-plant, in the other powdered lime made of the ashes of potato-skins. The coca is the strongest sort of a tonic, and by chewing it the Chillano soldier can abstain from food or drink for a week or ten days at a stretch. He takes a bunch of leaves as big as a quid of tobacco in his mouth, and occasionally mixes the potato-ashes with the saliva to give the juice a relish. Canon Kingsley, in that remarkable novel, “Westward Ho!” describes two of the band of Amyas Leigh as deserting their companions at the sources of the Amazon, and takes them into a beautiful bower with two Dianas of the Indian type. There they chew coca-leaves with the girls, sink into a voluptuous stupor, and give themselves up to love, like the lotos-eaters, until Amyas comes to remonstrate. The men recommend him to follow their example with the Venus who has been found in an Indian queen and admires the young commander; and the Puritan is on the point of yielding to the fascination of the scene, when a reptile comes, strangles one of the girls, and revives the moral instincts of the men. The reverend word-painter was misinformed as to the peculiar influence of the drug, as it does not produce a stupor in those who use it. It is not a narcotic, but a stimulant.