At Paramo, on the beach, they now use a combination of wooden sluices and a copper-plate machine with which all gold miners are familiar, but which could not be briefly described here. The riffles in the sluices save the coarser gold, while the mercury on the copper plates takes up the flour gold as it drifts away over the plates. Water for all the machines is pumped from the sea, and it is worth while telling that experiments there show that some pay streaks can be profitably worked with salt water when fresh water fails to save a satisfactory return. Geologists find this gold-bearing layer of black sand (it is a magnetic iron sand) a most interesting study. They say the deposit at Paramo is a continuation of that found at Cape Virgin, and that deposit is found at intervals on the Patagonia coast to the Gallegos River. The geologists are even confident that it crops out at intervals for over a thousand miles along the Patagonia coast--always below the water line. Of course, this bed of sand was deposited where it is now found by the action of water, and it must have existed at one time in the form of a reef or vein a thousand miles long in some prehistoric range of mountains. What a lead that would have been for some lone prospector! [Illustration: GOLD-WASHING MACHINES. PARAMO, TIERRA DEL FUEGO] Returning north from Paramo on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego, the transport entered the Straits of Magellan and went to Punta Arenas. From Punta Arenas we went down through Cockburn Channel to the Antarctic Ocean, and then, turning east, cruised through Brecknock Pass, Desolation Bay, Whale Sound, Darwin Sound, and Beagle Channel via the Northwest arm. Thence we coasted along east and up through the Straits of Le Maire on the north side of Staten Island, which we followed to St. John Bay on the east end. These are positively the wildest, most dangerous waters in the world. As will be told, the hidden reefs and the whirling tornadoes formed combinations that made experienced travellers look serious, although in a steamer that was as good a seaboat as ever floated. And yet the prospectors of Punta Arenas have sailed all over that route, summer and winter, in twenty-five catboats, looking for gold.