AND OTHER THINGS.

To a man coming from the Southern Camps to the forest belt of Santa Fe,
the cachape must appeal as something peculiar to the district, and most
essentially local. He has had a surfeit of carts with two wheels, each
12 feet high, and dragged by anything from sixteen to twenty-eight
horses; Russian carts, like Thames punts on four wheels, no longer amuse
him, while American spring carts are much too European to warrant
unslinging the Kodak. But the cachape--here is something not to be
lightly passed over. Lying idle it may not strike him at first sight as
a cart, but rather as a remnant of some revolution, when, tired of
waging light operatic war, the army disbanded, leaving their
gun-carriages to serve more peaceful purposes.

Two pairs of short, squat, enormously powerful wheels; between, and
joining them, a roughly hewn pole and various chains in an apparently
hopeless tangle. Yet see them in work--every niche doing its work, every
chain taking ten per cent, more strain than it was ever intended to
take, creaking, groaning, crashing into holes, crawling laboriously over
snaps and trunks to fall again with its load of four tons with a
jerking, swaying, and straining as though struggling to free itself from
its load, and you recognise the _raison d'etre_ of the queer little
cart.

The capache is not without its humorous moments. Supposing the cartmen
find a log too heavy to load in the ordinary way; they do not return and
inform the boss that the log must be hoisted by mechanical means or
propose high-priced cranes. Seeing that obviously they can't put the log
on the cart, they accept the alternative and put the cart on the log,
chain it on securely, then haul everything right side up again with the
bullocks and proceed to the unloading station. Once there, it might be
supposed that they would tumble the cart over again, but here the
intelligent foreigner is misled. The correct proceeding now is for the
cartmen to lie on their backs and push with their feet, after the manner
of the gentlemen in music halls, who, reclining on sawed-off sofas,
twiddle gold-spangled spheres with their toes; only our cartmen lie in
water and mud and the gold-spangled sphere is changed for a three-ton
log. The force the men can exert in this position is little short of
marvellous. Out one crawls, reviews the situation, then back again
under, a creak, a combined push, and over the wheels comes the log,
throwing up the m