their lives, still after twenty years is fresh, and stirs me, as the memory of the Pacific stirs a reclaimed “beach-comber” over his grog, and makes him say, “I never should have left them islands, for a man was happy in ’em, living on the beach.”

p. 33

p. 34

To this commercial centre (centro do commercio) we were advised to go, and there I rode, leaving my partner with the peons riding round the caballada upon the plains. Dressed as I was in the clothes worn by the Gauchos of the Banda Oriental, a hat tied underneath the chin with a black cord, a vicuña poncho, and armed with large resounding silver spurs, I made a blot of colour in Cardozo’s shop amongst the quietly dressed Brazilians, who, though they were some of the p. 35smartest men in South America upon a horse, were always clad in sober-coloured raiment, wore ordinary store-cut trousers, and had their feet endued with all the graces of a five-dollar elastic-sided boot.

p. 35

Half-an-hour’s talk with the chief partner shattered all our plans. It then appeared that to take horses on to Rio was impossible, the country, after San Paulo, being one dense forest, and even if the horses stood the change of climate, the trip would take a year, thus running off with any profit which we might expect. Moreover, it appeared that mules were in demand throughout Brazil, but horses, till past San Paulo, five hundred miles ahead, but little valued, and almost as cheap, though much inferior in breed to those bred on the plains of Uruguay. He further told us to lose not a day in teaching all the horses to eat salt, for without that they would not live a month, as once the range of mountains passed between Cruz Alta and the plains, no horse or mule could live without its three months’ ration of rock-salt; there being in the pasture some malign quality which salt alone could cure. Naturally he had the cheapest salt in the whole town, and as our horses were by this time so thin that it was quite impossible to take them further without rest, they having been a month upon the road, we set about to find an enclosed pasture where we could let them feed.

p. 36Xavier Fernandez, a retired slave- and mule-dealer, was the man on whom by accident we fell. Riding about the plain disconsolately, like Arabs changing their pastures, and with our horses feeding near a little pond, we met him. An old straw hat, bed-ticking trousers, and with his naked feet shoved into slippers of carpindo leather, and an iron spur attached to one of them 

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