horse, the women of the family never sat down to table with the men, and if a stranger chanced to call on business at their house, they were as jealously kept from his eyes as they had all been Turks. p. 27 The “Fazenda” houses had great iron-studded doors, often a moat, and not infrequently a rusty cannon, though generally dismounted, and a relic of bygone time. The traveller fared, as a general rule, much worse than in the Banda Oriental, for save at the large cattle-farms it was impossible to buy a piece of meat. Admitted to the house, one rarely passed beyond the guest-chamber, a room with four bare white-washed walls; having for furniture a narrow hard-wood table with wrought-iron supports between its legs; chairs cut apparently out of the solid block, and a tin bucket or a large gourd in the corner, with drinking-water; so that one’s sojourn at the place was generally brief, and one’s departure a relief to all concerned. Still on the frontier the Gaucho influence made itself a little felt, and people were not so inhospitable as they were further in the interior of the land. Two or three leagues beyond the pass there was a little town called “Don Pedrito,” towards which we made; p. 28but a “Pampero,” whistling from the south, forced us to camp upon a stream known as the “Poncho Verde,” where, in the forties, Garibaldi was reported to have fought. p. 28 Wet to the skin and without food, we saw a fazenda not a mile away, rode up to it, and for a wonder were asked inside, had dinner in the guest-chamber, the owner sitting but not eating with us; the black Brazilian beans and bacon carried in pompously by three or four stalwart slaves, who puffed and sweated, trod on each other’s naked toes, and generally behaved as they had been carrying sacks of corn aboard a ship, only that in this instance no one stood in the gangway with a whip. Much did the conversation run on politics; upon “A Guerra dos Farapos,” which it appeared had riven the country in twain what time our host was young. Farapo means a rag, and the Republicans of fifty years ago in Rio Grande had adopted the device after the fashion of “Les gueux.” Long did they fight, and our host said: “Praise to God, infructuously,” for how could men who wore moustaches and full beards be compared to those who, like our host himself, wore whiskers carefully trimmed in the style of those which at the same epoch in our country were the trade-mark of the Iron Duke? Elective kings, for so the old “conservador” termed presidents, did not find favour in his eyes; and in religion too the “farapos” were seriously astray.
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