with a head as if it had been painted white to the ears; behind them, coal-black down to his feet, which, curiously enough, were all four white. A third, Overo Azulejo, slate-coloured and white; he was of special interest, for he had twisted in his mane a large iron spur, and underneath a lump as large as an apple, where the spur p. 15had bumped upon his neck for years during his gallop through the woods and plains. Each horse had some peculiarity, most had been tame at one time, and were therefore more to be dreaded than if they had been never mounted in their lives.

p. 15

As it was late when we arrived we tied our horses up and found a ball in progress at the house. Braulio Islas was the owner’s name, a man of some position in the land, young and unmarried, and having passed some years of his life in Monte Video, where, as is usual, he had become a doctor either of law or medicine; but the life had not allured him, and he had drifted back to the country, where he lived, half as a Gaucho, half as a “Dotorcito,” riding a wild horse as he were part of him, and yet having a few old books, quoting dog Latin, and in the interim studying international law, after the fashion of the semi-educated in the River Plate. Fastening our horses to long twisted green-hide ropes, we passed into the house. “Carne con cuero” (meat cooked with the hide) was roasting near the front-door on a great fire of bones. Around it men sat drinking maté, smoking and talking, whilst tame ostriches peered into the fire and snapped up anything within their reach; dogs without hair, looking like pigs, ran to and fro, horses were tied to every post, fire-flies darted about the trees; and, above all, the notes, sung in a high falsetto voice of a most lamentable Paraguayan “triste,” quavered in the night air and set the dogs a-barking, when all p. 16the company at stated intervals took up the refrain, and chanted hoarsely or shrilly of the hardships passed by Lopez in his great camp at Pirayú.

p. 16

Under the straw-thatched sheds whole cows and sheep were hung up; and every one, when he felt hungry, cut a collop off and cooked it in the embers, for in those days meat had no price, and if you came up hungry to a house a man would say: “There is a lazo, and the cattle are feeding in a hollow half a league away.”

A harp, two cracked guitars, the strings repaired with strips of hide, and an accordion, comprised the band. The girls sat in a row, upon rush-seated chairs, and on the walls were ranged either great bowls of grease in which wicks floated, or homemade candles fixed on to nails, 

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