To this the gaucho will reply by declining with thanks, and the matter is ended comfortably. It is an offence to decline bluntly to drink, because in the gaucho's mind such a refusal could only come from one who felt himself very much above the company assembled. There is one kind of a drink, however, which no one should refuse without first, as said in another case, getting the drop with a good gun on the other fellow, and that drink is _mate_. The drinking of _mate_ among the gauchos, and among all Argentines for that matter, is like the smoking of the calumet among North American Indians. A small gourd is nearly filled with the powdered herb, and then boiling water is poured in to fill the cup. This done, a silver tube with a strainer at the bottom is poked into the decoction, and the drinker sucks the liquid up through the tube. Now, as soon as the tea has been sucked out the tea-maker fills the gourd once more with hot water, and passes it to the next person in the group, and so on. The one gourd and the one tube must serve for all the company. It will try the stomach of the inexperienced traveller to take the tube into his mouth wet from the lips of a drunken gaucho, but he had better do it with thanks and look happy. It is better to put a vile tube in the mouth than to receive a keen knife blade in the belly. And those are the horns of the dilemma often presented to the man who interviews gauchos in their native haunts. And of all things it is the worst insult possible to wipe off a mouth-piece before taking it into the mouth. Though ignorant of books, the gaucho is a keen observer of nature. He is a thinker, bright, too, if not a deep one. His terms and sayings ought to be gathered into a book for the instruction, as well as the amusement of his fellow-man. He calls the chase of the ostrich the wild mirth of the desert. The panther is "the friend of man," because it has been known to defend men from the attack of the more vicious jaguar, and because it often comes to purr about solitary travellers on the pampas, as a tame cat might do. The rattlesnake, a species not known in Patagonia, however, is the bell snake. The dragon fly is "the son of the southwest gale," because that wind often brings clouds of these insects. There is a huge and fierce spider on the hotter pampas that does not hesitate to attack man--a most repulsive and fearsome being. The gauchos have a weird song in which they tell of an army of these that came to attack a city, and although the men of the town fought bravely, all were routed and overwhelmed by the terrible foe.