HE artist or the writer who visits South America to-day finds it as a diamond of a hundred facets, and his main difficulty is to select those points upon which to concentrate his gaze. So vast is the subject, so full of romance, glamour, pulsating life, and world possibilities that not one book but many must be written upon it before the reader can form the barest idea of the well-nigh illimitable nature of the theme. Hence an author who offers any contribution to so vast a study has no need to excuse himself for his apparent temerity, provided he sets on record some new point of view or chronicles his impressions of paths not too well known.