their clothes and missals on their heads, may God have pardoned you. Not that the sins of either of them could have been great, or of the kind but that the briefest sojourn in purgatory should not have wiped them out. To those rare Catholic families in Scotland an old-world flavour clings. When Knox and that “lewid monk,” the Regent Murray, all agog for progress and so-called purer worship, pestered and bothered Scotland into a change of faith, those few who clung to Catholicism seemed to become repositories of the traditions of an older world. Heaven and hell, no resting-place for the weaker souls between, have rendered Scotland a hard place for the ordinary man who wants his purgatory, even if by another name. Surely our Scottish theologians p. 10had done well, although they heated up our hell like a glass furnace, to leave us purgatory; that is if “Glesca” be not purgatory enough even for those who, like North Britons, have no doubt on any subject either in heaven above, or in the earth below. So to the house of Don Guillermo—even the name has now escaped me, though I see it, mud-built and thatched with “paja,” standing on a little sandy hill, surrounded on two sides by wood, on the others looking straight out upon the open “camp”—hot foot we came. Riding upon two strayed horses known as “ajenos,” bought for a dollar each in Durazno, we arrived, carrying our scanty property in saddle-bags, rode to the door, called out “Hail, Mary!” after the fashion of the country and in deference to the religion of our hosts, which was itself of so sincere a caste that every one attempted to conform to it, as far as possible, whilst in their house; received the answer “Without sin conceived”; got off, and straightway launched into a discussion of our plan. p. 10 Assembled in the house were Wycherley, Harrington and Trevelyan, and other commentators, whose names have slipped my mind. Some were “estancieros,” that is cattle or sheep farmers; others again were loafers, all mostly men of education, with the exception of Newfoundland Jack, a sailor, who had left the navy in a hurry, after some peccadillo, but who, once in the camp, took a high place amongst men, by his knowledge of splicing, p. 11making turks’ heads, and generally applying all his acquired sea-lore to saddlery, and from a trick he had of forcing home his arguments with a short knife, the handle fixed on with a raw cow’s tail, and which in using he threw from hand to hand, and generally succeeded in burying deeply in his opponent’s chest. Our friends all
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