XIMUDEJAR

This first reverse was but an incident, and by degrees the friars, this time accompanied by soldiers, explored more of the islands in the lake.  At last they came to one called Tayasal, which was so full of idols that they took twelve hours to burn and to destroy them all.

One island still remained to be explored,and in it was a temple with an idol much reverenced by the Indians.  At last they entered it, and on a platform about the height of a tall man they saw the figure of a horse rudely carved out of stone.

The horse was seated on the ground resting upon his quarters, his hind legs bent and his front feet stretched out.  The barbarous infidels[116a]adored the abominable and monstrous beast under the name of Tziunchan, God of the Thunder and the Lightning, and paid it reverence.  Even the Spaniards, who, as a rule, were not much given to inquiring into the history of idols, but broke them instantly,ad majorem Dei gloriam, were interested and amazed.  Little by little they learned the history of the hippomorphous god, which had been carefully preserved.  It appeared that when Cortes had left his horse, so many years ago, the Indians, seeing he was ill, took him into a temple to take care of him.  Thinking he was a reasoning animal,[116b]they placed before him fruit and chickens, with the result that the poor beast—who, of course, wasreasonable enough in his own way—eventually died.

The Indians, terrified and fearful that Cortes would take revenge upon them for the death of the horse that he had left for them to care for and to minister to all his wants, before they buried him, carved a rude statue in his likeness and placed it in a temple in the lake.

The devil, who, as Villagutierre observes, is never slack to take advantage when he can, seeing the blindness and the superstition (which was great) of those abominable idolaters, induced them by degrees to make a God of the graven image they had made.  Their veneration grew with time, just as bad weeds grow up in corn, as Holy Writ sets forth for our example, and that abominable statue became the chiefest of their gods, though they had many others equally horrible.

As the first horses that they saw were ridden by the Spaniards in the chase of the tame deer, and many shots were fired, the Indians not unnaturally connected the explosions and the flames less with the rider than the horse.  Thus in the course of years the evolution of the great god Tziunchan took place, and, asthe missionaries said, these heathen steeped in ignorance adored the work of their own hands.

Father Orbieta, not stopping to reflect that all of us adore what we have made, but “filled with the spirit of the Lord and carried off with furious zeal for the honour of our God,”[118]seized a great stone and in an instant cast the idol down, then with a hammer he broke it into bits.

When Father Orbieta had finished his work and thus destroyed one of the most curious monuments of the New World, which ought to have been preserved as carefully as if it had been carved by Praxiteles, “with the ineffable and holy joy that filled him, his face shone with a light so spiritual that it was something to praise God for and to view with delight.”  Most foolish actions usually inspire their perpetrators with delight, although their faces do not shine with spiritual joy when they have done them; so when one reads the folly of this muddle-headed friar, it sets one hoping that several of the stones went home upon his back as he sat paddling the canoe.

The Indians broke into lamentations,exclaiming, “Death to him, he has killed our God”; but were prevented from avenging his demise by the Spanish soldiers who prudently had accompanied the friar.

Thus was the mystery of the eternal Word made manifest amongst the Maçotecas, and a deity destroyed who for a hundred years and more had done no harm to any one on earth . . . a thing unusual amongst Gods.

Brown, severe, and wall-girt, the stubborn city still held out.

Its proud traditions made it impossible for Zaragoza to capitulate without a siege.  As in the days of Soult, when the heroic maid, theartillera, as her countrymen call her with pride, when Palafox held up the blood and orange banner in which float the lions and the castles of Castille, the city answered shot for shot.

Fire spurted from the Moorish walls, built by the Beni Hud, who reigned in Zaragoza, when still Sohail poured its protecting rays upon the land.  The bluish wreaths of smoke curled on the Ebro, running along the water and enveloping the Coso as if in a mist.

A dropping rifle-fire crackled out from the ramparts, and above the castle the red flagof the Intransigent-Republic shivered and fluttered in the breeze.

The Torre-Nueva sprang from the middle of the town, just as a palm tree rises from the desert sands.  It was built at the time when Moorish artisans, infidel dogs who yet preserved the secrets of the East amongst the Christians (may dogs defile their graves), had spent their science and their love upon it.

Octagonal, and looking as if blown into the air by the magician’s art, it leaned a little to one side, and, as the admiring inhabitants averred, drawing their right hands open over their left arms, laughed at its rival of Bologna and at every other tower on earth.

No finer specimen of the art known as Mudejar existed in all Spain.  Galleries cut it here and there; and ajimeces, the little horseshoe windows divided by a marble pillar, loved of the Moors, which tradition says they took from the rude openings in their tents of camel’s hair, gave light to the inside.  Stages of inclined planes led to the top, so gradual in their ascent that once a Queen of Spain had ridden up them to admire the view over the Sierras upon her palfrey, or her donkey, for all is onewhen treating of a queen, who of a certainty ennobles the animal she deigns to ride upon.  Bold ajaracas, the patterns proper to the style of architecture, stood up in high relief upon its sides, and near the balustrade upon the top a band of bluish tiles relieved the brownness of the brickwork and sparkled in the sun.  Sieges and time and storms, rain, wind, and snow had spared it; even the neglect of centuries had left it unimpaired—erect and elegant as a young Arab maiden carrying water from the well.  Architects said that it inclined a little more each year, and talked about subsidences; but they were foreigners, unused to the things of Spain, and no one marked them; and the tower continued to be loved and prized and to fall into disrepair.  On this occasion riflemen lined the galleries, pouring a hot fire upon the attacking forces of the Government.

Encamped upon the heights above Torero, the Governmental army held the banks of the canal that gives an air of Holland to that part of the adust and calcined landscape of Aragon.

The General’s quarters overlooked the town, and from them he could see SantaEngracia, in whose crypt repose the bodies of the martyrs in an atmosphere of ice, standing alone upon its little plaza, fringed by a belt of stunted and ill-grown acacia trees.  The great cathedral, with its domes, in which the shrine of the tutelary Virgin of the Pilar, the Pilarica of the country folk, glittering with jewels and with silver plate, is venerated as befits the abiding place on earth of the miraculous figure sent direct from heaven, towered into the sky.

Churches and towers and convents, old castellated houses with their overhanging eaves and coats-of-arms upon the doors, jewels of architecture, memorials of the past, formed as it were a jungle wrought in a warm brown stone.  Beyond the city towered the mountains that hang over Huesca of the Bell.  Through them the Aragon has cut its roaring passages towards Sobrarbe to the south.  Northwards they circle Jaca, the virgin little city that beat off the Moors a thousand years ago, and still once every year commemorates her prowess outside the walls, where Moors and Christians fight again the unequal contest, into which St. James, mounted upon his milk-whitecharger, had plunged and thrown the weight of his right arm.  The light was so intense and African that on the mountain sides each rock was visible, outlined as in a camera-lucida, and as the artillery played upon the tower the effects of every salvo showed up distinctly on the crumbling walls.  All round the Government’s encampment stood groups of peasantry who had been impressed together with their animals to bring provisions.  Wrapped in their brown and white checked blankets, dressed in tight knee-breeches, short jackets, and grey stockings, and shod with alpargatas—the canvas, hemp-soled sandals that are fastened round the ankles with blue cords—they stood and smoked, stolid as Moors, and as unfathomable as the deep mysterious corries of their hills.

When the artillery thundered and the breaches in the walls grew daily more apparent and more ominous, the country people merely smiled, for they were sure the Pilarica would preserve the city; and even if she did not, all Governments, republican or clerical, were the same to them.

All their ambition was to live quietly, eachin his village, which to him was the hub round which the world revolved.

So one would say, as they stood watching the progress of the siege: “Chiquio, the sciences advance a bestiality, the Government in the Madrids can hear each cannon-shot.  The sound goes on those wires that stretch upon the posts we tie our donkeys to when we come into town. . . .”

Little by little the forces of the Government advanced, crossing the Ebro at the bridge which spans it in the middle of the great double promenade called the Coso, and by degrees drew near the walls.

The stubborn guerrilleros in the town contested every point of vantage, fighting like wolves, throwing themselves with knives and scythes stuck upright on long poles upon the troops.

So fought their grandfathers against the French, and so Strabo describes their ancestors, adding, “The Spaniard is a taciturn, dark man, usually dressed in black; he fights with a short sword, and always tries to come to close grips with our legionaries.”

As happens in all civil wars, when brotherfinds himself opposed to brother, the strife was mortal, and he who fell received no mercy from the conqueror.

The riflemen upon the Torre Nueva poured in their fire, especially upon the Regiment of Pavia, whose Colonel, Don Luis Montoro, on several occasions gave orders to the artillerymen at any cost to spare the tower.

Officer after officer fell by his side, and soldiers in the ranks cursed audibly, covering the saints with filth, as runs the phrase in Spanish, and wondering why their Colonel did not dislodge the riflemen who made such havoc in their files.  Discipline told at last, and all the Intransigents were forced inside the walls, leaving the moat with but a single plank to cross it by which to reach the town.  Upon the plank the fire was concentrated from the walls, and the besiegers stood for a space appalled, sheltering themselves as best they could behind the trees and inequalities of the ground.

Montoro called for volunteers, and one by one three grizzled soldiers, who had grown grey in wars against the Moors, stepped forward and fell pierced with a dozen wounds.

After a pause there was a movement in the ranks, and with a sword in his right hand, and in his left the colours of Castille, his brown stuff gown tucked up showing his hairy knees knotted and muscular, out stepped a friar, and strode towards the plank.  Taking the sword between his teeth he crossed himself, and beckoning on the men, rushed forward in the thickest of the fire.

He crossed in safety, and then the regiment, with a hoarse shout of “Long live God,” dashed on behind him, some carrying planks and others crossing upon bales of straw, which they had thrown into the moat.  Under the walls they formed and rushed into the town, only to find each house a fortress and each street blocked by a barricade.  From every window dark faces peered, and a continual fusillade was poured upon them, whilst from the house-tops the women showered down tiles.

Smoke filled the narrow streets, and from dark archways groups of desperate men came rushing, armed with knives, only to fall in heaps before the troops who, with fixed bayonets, steadily pushed on.

A shift of wind cleared off the smoke and showed the crimson flag still floating from the citadel, ragged and torn by shots.  Beyond the town appeared the mountains peeping out shyly through the smoke, as if they looked down on the follies of mankind with a contemptuous air.

Dead bodies strewed the streets, in attitudes half tragical, half ludicrous, some looking like mere bundles of old clothes, and some distorted with a stiff arm still pointing to the sky.

Right in the middle of a little square the friar lay shot through the forehead, his sword beside him, and with the flag clasped tightly to his breast.

His great brown eyes stared upwards, and as the soldiers passed him some of them crossed themselves, and an old sergeant spoke his epitaph: “This friar,” he said, “was not of those fit only for the Lord; he would have made a soldier, and a good one; may God have pardoned him.”

Driven into the middle plaza of the town, the Intransigents fought till the last, selling their lives for more than they were worth, and dying silently.

The citadel was taken with a rush, and the red flag hauled down.

Bugles rang out from the other angle of the plaza; the General and his staff rode slowly forward to meet the Regiment of Pavia as it debouched into the square.

Colonel Montoro halted, and then, saluting, advanced towards his chief.  His General, turning to him, angrily exclaimed, “Tell me, why did you let those fellows in the tower do so much damage, when a few shots from the field guns would have soon finished them?”

Montoro hesitated, and recovering his sword once more saluted as his horse fretted on the curb, snorting and sidling from the dead bodies that were strewed upon the ground.

“My General,” he said, “not for all Spain and half the Indies would I have trained the cannon on the tower; it is Mudejar of the purest architecture.”

His General smiled at him a little grimly, and saying, “Well, after all, this is no time to ask accounts from any man,” touched his horse with the spur and, followed by his staff, he disappeared into the town.

Thecity sweltered in the August heat.  No breath of air lifted the pall of haze that wrapped the streets, the houses, and the dark group of Græco-Roman buildings that stands up like a rock in the dull tide-way of the brick-built tenements that compose the town.

Bells pealed at intervals, summoning the fractioned faithful to their various centres of belief.

When they had ceased and all the congregations were assembled listening to the exhortations of their spiritual advisers, and were employed fumbling inside their purses, as they listened, for the destined “threepenny,” that obolus which gives respectability to alms, the silence was complete.  Whitey-brown paper bags, dropped overnight, just stirredoccasionally as the air swelled their bellies, making them seem alive, or as alive as is a jelly-fish left stranded by the tide.

Just as the faithful were assembled in their conventicles adoring the same Deity, all filled with rancour against one another because their methods of interpretation of the Creator’s will were different, so did the politicians and the cranks of every sort and sect turn out to push their methods of salvation for mankind.  In groups they gathered round the various speakers who discoursed from chairs and carts and points of vantage on the streets.

Above the speakers’ heads, banners, held up between two poles, called on the audiences to vote for Liberal or for Tory, for Poor Law Reform, for Social Purity, and for Temperance.  Orators, varying from well-dressed and glibly-educated hacks from party centres, to red-faced working-men, held forth perspiring, and occasionally bedewing those who listened to them with saliva, after an emphatic burst.

It seemed so easy after listening to them to redress all wrongs, smooth out all wrinkles, and instate each citizen in his own shop where he could sell his sweated goods, with the bestadvantage to himself and with the greatest modicum of disadvantage to his neighbour, that one was left amazed at the dense apathy of those who did not fall in with the nostrums they had heard.  Again, at other platforms, sleek men in broadcloth, who had never seen a plough except at Agricultural Exhibitions, nor had got on closer terms of friendship with a horse than to be bitten by him as they passed along a street, discoursed upon the land.

“My friends, I say, the land is a fixed quantity, you can’t increase it, and without it, it’s impossible to live.  ’Ow is it, then, that all the land of England is in so few hands?”  He paused and mopped his face, and looking round, began again: “Friends—you’ll allow me to style you Friends, I know, Friends in the sycred cause of Liberty—the landed aristocracy is our enemy.

“I am not out for confiscation, why should I?  I ’ave my ’ome purchased with the fruits of my own hhonest toil . . .”

Before he could conclude his sentence, a dock labourer, dressed in his Sunday suit of shoddy serge, check shirt, and black silk handkerchief knotted loosely round his neck,looked up, and interjected: “’Ard work, too, mate, that ’ere talkin’ in the sun is, that built your ’ome.  Beats coal whippin’.”

Just for an instant the orator was disconcerted as a laugh ran through the audience; but habit, joined to a natural gift of public speaking, came to his aid, and he rejoined: “Brother working-men, I say ditto to what has fallen from our friend ’ere upon my right.  We all are working-men.  Some of us, like our friend, work with their ’ands, and others with their ’eds.  In either case, the Land is what we ’ave to get at as an article of prime necessity.”

Rapidly he sketched a state of things in which a happy population, drawn from the slums, but all instinct with agricultural knowledge, would be settled on the land, each on his little farm, and all devoted to intensive culture in the most modern form.  Trees would be all cut down, because they only “’arbour” birds that eat the corn.  Hedges would all be extirpated, for it is known to every one that mice and rats and animals of every kind live under them, and that they only serve to shelter game.  Each man would owna gun and be at liberty to kill a “rabbut” or a “’are”—“animals, as we say at college,feery naturrey, and placed by Providence upon the land.”

These noble sentiments evoked applause, which was a little mitigated by an interjection from a man in gaiters, with a sunburnt face, of: “Mister, if every one is to have a gun and shoot, ’ow long will these ’ere ’ares and rabbuts last?”

A little farther on, as thinly covered by his indecently transparent veil of reciprocity as a bare-footed dancer in her Grecian clothes, or a tall ostrich under an inch of sand, and yet as confident as either of them that the essential is concealed, a staunch Protectionist discoursed.  With copious notes, to which he turned at intervals, when he appealed to those statistics which can be made in any question to fit every side, he talked of loss of trade.  “Friends, we must tax the foreigner.  It is this way, you see, our working classes have to compete with other nations, all of which enjoy protective duties.  I ask you, is it reasonable that we should let a foreign article come into England?”

Here a dour-looking Scotsman almost spatout the words: “Man, can ye no juist say Great Britain?” and received a bow and “Certainly, my friend, I am not here to wound the sentiments of any man . . . as I was saying, is it reasonable that goods should come to England . . . I mean Great Britain, duty free, and yet articles we manufacture have to pay heavy duties in any foreign port?”

“’Ow about bread?” came from a voice upon the outskirts of the crowd.

The speaker reddened, and resumed: “My friend, man doth not live by bread alone; still, I understand the point.  A little dooty upon corn, say five shillings in the quarter, would not hurt any one.  We’ve got to do it.  The foreigner is the enemy.  I am a Christian; but yet, readin’ as I often do the Sermon on the Mount, I never saw we had to lie down in the dust and let ourselves be trampled on.

“Who are to be the inheritors of the earth?  Our Lord says, ‘Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit it.’”

He paused, and was about to clinch his argument, when a tall Irishman, after expectorating judiciously upon a vacant space between two listeners, shot in: “Shure, then,the English are the meekest of the lot, for they have got the greater part of it.”

At other gatherings Socialists held forth under the red flag.  “That banner, comrades, which ’as braved a ’undred fights, and the mere sight of which makes the Capitalistic bloodsucker tremble as he feels the time approach when Lybor shall come into its inheritance and the Proletariat shyke off its chaine and join ’ands all the world over, despizin’ ryce and creed and all the artificial obstructions that a designin’ Priest-’ood and a blood-stained Plutocracy ’ave placed between them to distract their attention from the great cause of Socialism, the great cause that mykes us comrades . . . ’ere, keep off my ’oof, you blighter, with your ammunition wagons. . . .”

Religionists of various sects, all with long hair and dressed in shabby black, the Book either before them on a campaigning lectern or tucked beneath one arm, called upon Christian men to dip their hands into the precious blood and drink from the eternal fountain of pure water that is to be found in the Apocalypse.  “Come to ’Im, come to ’Im, I say, my friends, come straight; oh, it isjoyful to belong to Jesus.  Don’t stop for anything, come to ’Im now like little children. . . .  Let us sing a ’ymn.  You know it, most of you; but brother ’ere,” and as he spoke he turned towards a pale-faced youth who held a bag to take the offertory, that sacrament that makes the whole world kin, “will lead it for you.”

The acolyte cleared his throat raucously, and to a popular air struck up the refrain of “Let us jump joyful on the road.”  Flat-breasted girls and pale-faced boys took up the strain, and as it floated through the heavy air, reverberating from the pile of public buildings, gradually all the crowd joined in; shyly at first and then whole-heartedly, and by degrees the vulgar tune and doggerel verses took on an air of power and dignity, and when the hymn was finished, the tears stood in the eyes of grimy-looking women and of red-faced men.  Then, with his bag, the pale-faced hymn-leader went through the crowd, reaping a plenteous harvest, all in copper, from those whose hearts had felt, but for a moment, the full force of sympathy.

Suffragist ladies discussed upon “theQuestion,” shocking their hearers as they touched on prostitution and divorce, and making even stolid policemen, who stood sweating in their thick blue uniforms, turn their eyes upon the ground.

After them, Suffragette girls bounded upon the cart, consigning fathers, brothers, and the whole male section of mankind straight to perdition as they held forth upon the Vote, that all-heal of the female politician, who thinks by means of it to wipe out all those disabilities imposed upon her by an unreasonable Nature and a male Deity, who must have worked alone up in the Empyrean without the humanising influence of a wife.

Little by little the various groups dissolved, the speakers and their friends forcing their “literatoor” upon the passers-by, who generally appeared to look into the air a foot or two above their heads, as they went homewards through the streets.

The Anarchists were the last to leave, a faithful few still congregating around a youth in a red necktie who denounced the other speakers with impartiality, averring that they were “humbugs every one of them,” and, forhis part, he believed only in dynamite, by means of which he hoped some day to be able to devote “all the blood-suckers to destruction, and thus to bring about the reign of brotherhood.”

The little knot of the elect applauded loudly, and the youth, catching the policeman’s eye fixed on him, descended hurriedly from off the chair on which he had been perorating, remarking that “it was time to be going home to have a bit of dinner, as he was due to speak at Salford in the evening.”

Slowly the square was emptied, the last group or two of people disappearing into the mouths of the incoming streets just as a Roman crowd must have been swallowed up in the vomitoria of an amphitheatre, after a show of gladiators.

Torn newspapers and ends of cigarettes were the sole result of all the rhetoric that had been poured out so liberally upon the assembled thousands in the square.

Two or three street boys in their shirt-sleeves, bare-footed and bare-headed, their trousers held up by a piece of string, played about listlessly, after the fashion of their kindon Sunday in a manufacturing town, when the life of the streets is dead, and when men’s minds are fixed either upon the mysteries of the faith or upon beer, things in which children have but little share.

The usual Sabbath gloom was creeping on the town and dinner-time approaching, when from a corner of the square appeared a man advancing rapidly.  He glanced about inquiringly, and for a moment a look of disappointment crossed his face.  Mounting the steps that lead up to the smoke-coated Areopagus, he stopped just for an instant, as if to draw his breath and gather his ideas.  Decently dressed in shabby black, his trousers frayed a little above the heels of his elastic-sided boots, his soft felt hat that covered long but scanty hair just touched with grey, he had an air as of a plaster figure set in the middle of a pond, as he stood silhouetted against the background of the buildings, forlorn yet resolute.

The urchins, who had gathered round him, had a look upon their faces as of experienced critics at a play; that look of expectation and subconscious irony which characterises all their kind at public spectacles.

Their appearance, although calculated to appal a speaker broken to the platform business, did not influence the man who stood upon the steps.  Taking off his battered hat, he placed it and his umbrella carefully upon the ground.  A light, as of the interior fire that burned in the frail tenement of flesh so fiercely that it illuminated his whole being, shone in his mild blue eyes.  Clearing his throat, and after running his nervous hands through his thin hair, he pitched his voice well forward, as if the deserted square had been packed full of people prepared to hang upon his words.  His voice, a little hoarse and broken during his first sentences, gradually grew clearer, developing a strength quite incommensurate with the source from which it came.

“My friends,” he said, causing the boys to grin and waking up the dozing policeman, “I have a doctrine to proclaim.  Love only rules the world.  The Greek wordcaritasin the New Testament should have been rendered love.  Love suffereth long.  Love is not puffed up; love beareth all things.  That is what the Apostle really meant to say.  Often within this very square I have stood listening to thespeeches, and have weighed them in my mind.  It is not for me to criticise, only to advocate my own belief.  Friends . . .”

As his voice had gathered strength, two or three working-men, attracted by the sight of a man speaking to the air, surrounded but by the street boys and the nodding policeman on his beat, had gathered round about.  Dressed in their Sunday clothes; well washed, and with the look as of restraint that freedom from their accustomed toil often imparts to them on Sunday, they listened stolidly, with that toleration that accepts all doctrines, from that of highest Toryism down to Anarchy, and acts on none of them.  The speaker, spurred on by the unwonted sight of listeners, for several draggled women had drawn near, and an ice-cream seller had brought his donkey-cart up to the nearest curb-stone, once more launched into his discourse.

“Friends, when I hear the acerbity of the address of some; when I hear doctrines setting forth the rights but leaving out the duties of the working class; when I hear men defend the sweater and run down the sweated, calling them thriftless, idle, and intemperate, whenoften they are but unfortunate, I ask myself, what has become of Love?  Who sees more clearly than I do myself what the poor have to suffer?  Do I not live amongst them and share their difficulties?  Who can divine better than one who has imagination—and in that respect I thank my stars I have not been left quite unendowed—what are the difficulties of those high placed by fortune, who yet have got to strive to keep their place?

“Sweaters and sweated, the poor, the rich, men, women, children, all mankind, suffer from want of Love.  I am not here to say that natural laws will ever cease to operate, or that there will not be great inequalities, if not of fortune, yet of endowments, to the end of Time.  What the Great Power who sent us here intended, only He can tell.  One thing He placed within the grasp of every one, capacity to love.  Think, friends, what England might become under the reign of universal love.  The murky fumes that now defile the landscape, the manufactories in which our thousands toil for others, the rivers vile with refuse, the knotted bodies and the faces scarcely human in their abject struggle for their daily bread,would disappear.  Bradford and Halifax and Leeds would once again be fair and clean.  The ferns would grow once more in Shipley Glen, and in the valleys about Sheffield the scissor-grinders would ply their trade upon streams bright and sparkling, as they were of yore.  In Halifax, the Roman road, now black with coal-dust and with mud, would shine as well-defined as it does where now and then it crops out from the ling upon the moors, just as the Romans left it polished by their caligulæ.  Why, do you ask me?  Because all sordid motives would be gone, and of their superfluity the rich would give to those less blessed by Providence.  The poor would grudge no one the gifts of fortune, and thus the need for grinding toil would disappear, as the struggle and the strain for daily bread would fade into the past.

“Picture to yourselves, my friends, an England once more green and merry, with the air fresh and not polluted by the smoke of foetid towns.

“’Tis pleasant, friends, on a spring morning to hear the village bells calling to church, even although they do not call you to attend.  Itheals the soul to see the honeysuckle and the eglantine and smell the new-mown hay. . . .

“Then comes a chill when on your vision rises the England of the manufacturing town, dark, dreary, and befouled with smoke.  How different it might be in the perpetual May morning I have sketched for you.

“Love suffereth all things, endureth all things, createth all things. . . .”

He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone.  The boys had stolen away, and the last workman’s sturdy back could be just seen as it was vanishing towards the public-house.

The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a soiled handkerchief.

Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look came into his blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily, conscious that the inner fire had got the better of the fleshly tenement, and that his work was done.

Thecamp was pitched upon the north bank of the Wad Nefis, not far from Tamoshlacht.  Above it towered the Atlas, looking like a wall, with scarce a peak to break its grim monotony.  A fringe of garden lands enclosed the sanctuary, in which the great Sherif lived in patriarchal style; half saint, half warrior, but wholly a merchant at the bottom, as are so many Arabs; all his surroundings enjoyed peculiar sanctity.

In the long avenue of cypresses the birds lived safely, for no one dared to frighten them, much less to fire a shot.  His baraka, that is the grace abounding, that distils from out the clothes, the person and each action of men such as the Sherif, who claim descent in apostolic continuity from the Blessed One,Mohammed, Allah’s own messenger, protected everything.  Of a mean presence, like the man who stood upon the Areopagus and beckoned with his hand, before he cast the spell of his keen, humoristic speech upon the Greeks, the holy one was of a middle stature.  His face was marked with smallpox.  His clothes were dirty, and his haik he sometimes mended with a thorn, doubling it, and thrusting one end through a slit to form a safety-pin.  His shoes were never new, his turban like an old bath towel; yet in his belt he wore a dagger with a gold hilt, for he was placed so far above the law, by virtue of his blood, that though the Koran especially enjoins the faithful not to wear gold, all that he did was good.

Though he drank nothing but pure water, or, for that matter, lapped it like a camel, clearing the scum off with his fingers if on a journey, he might have drank champagne or brandy, or mixed the two of them, for the Arabs are the most logical of men, and to them such a man as the Sherif is holy, not from anything he does, but because Allah has ordained it.  An attitude of mind as good asany other, and one that, after all, makes a man tolerant of human frailties.

Allah gives courage, virtue, eloquence, or skill in horsemanship.  He gives or he withholds them for his good pleasure; what he has written he has written, and therefore he who is without these gifts is not held blamable.  If he should chance to be a saint, that is a true descendant, in the male line, from him who answered nobly when his foolish followers asked him if his young wife, Ayesha, should sit at his right hand in paradise, “By Allah, not she; but old Kadijah, she who when all men mocked me, cherished and loved, she shall sit at my right hand,” that is enough for them.

So the Sherif was honoured, partly because he had great jars stuffed with gold coin, the produce of his olive yards, and also of the tribute that the faithful brought him; partly because of his descent; and perhaps, more than all, on account of his great store of Arab lore on every subject upon earth.  His fame was great, extending right through the Sus, the Draa, and down to Tazaûelt, where it met the opposing current of the grace of Bashir-el-Biruk, Sherif of the Wad-Nun.  He liked to talk toEuropeans, partly to show his learning, and partly to hear about the devilries they had invented to complicate their lives.

So when the evening prayer was called, and all was silent in his house, the faithful duly prostrate on their faces before Allah, who seems to take as little heed of them as he does of the other warring sects, each with its doctrine of damnation for their brethren outside the pale, the Sherif, who seldom prayed, knowing that even if he did so he could neither make nor yet unmake himself in Allah’s sight, called for his mule, and with two Arabs running by his side set out towards the unbeliever’s camp.

Though the Sherif paid no attention to it, the scene he rode through was like fairyland.  The moonbeams falling on the domes of house and mosque and sanctuary lit up the green and yellow tiles, making them sparkle like enamels.  Long shadows of the cypresses cast great bands of darkness upon the red sand of the avenue.  The croaking of the frogs sounded metallic, and by degrees resolved itself into a continuous tinkle, soothing and musical, in the Atlas night.  Camels lay ruminating, theirmonstrous packs upon their backs.  As the Sherif passed by them on his mule they snarled and bubbled, and a faint odour as of a menagerie, mingled with that of tar, with which the Arabs cure their girth and saddle galls, floated towards him, although no doubt custom had made it so familiar that he never heeded it.

From the Arab huts that gather around every sanctuary, their owners living on the baraka, a high-pitched voice to the accompaniment of a two-stringed guitar played with a piece of stiff palmetto leaf, and the monotonous Arab drum, that if you listen to it long enough invades the soul, blots from the mind the memory of towns, and makes the hearer long to cast his hat into the sea and join the dwellers in the tents, blended so inextricably with the shrill cricket’s note and the vast orchestra of the insects that were praising Allah on that night, each after his own fashion, that it was difficult to say where the voice ended and the insects’ hum began.

Still, in despite of all, the singing Arab, croaking of the frogs, and the shrill pæans of the insects, the night seemed calm and silent, for all the voices were attuned so well to thesurroundings that the serenity of the whole scene was unimpaired.

The tents lay in the moonlight like gigantic mushrooms; the rows of bottles cut in blue cloth with which the Arabs ornament them stood out upon the canvas as if in high relief.  The first light dew was falling, frosting the canvas as a piece of ice condenses air upon a glass.  In a long line before the tents stood the pack animals munching their corn placed on a cloth upon the ground.

A dark-grey horse, still with his saddle on for fear of the night air, was tied near to the door of the chief tent, well in his owner’s eye.  Now and again he pawed the ground, looked up, and neighed, straining upon the hobbles that confined his feet fast to the picket line.

On a camp chair his owner sat and smoked, and now and then half got up from his seat when the horse plunged or any of the mules stepped on their shackles and nearly fell upon the ground.

As the Sherif approached he rose to welcome him, listening to all the reiterated compliments and inquiries that no self-respecting Arab ever omits when he may chance to meet a friend.

A good address, like mercy, is twice blest, both in the giver and in the recipient of it; but chiefly it is beneficial to the giver, for in addition to the pleasure that he gives, he earns his own respect.  Well did both understand this aspect of the question, and so the compliments stretched out into perspectives quite unknown in Europe, until the host, taking his visitor by the hand, led him inside the tent.  “Ambassador,” said the Sherif, although he knew his friend was but a Consul, “my heart yearned towards thee, so I have come to talk with thee of many things, because I know that thou art wise, not only in the learning of thy people, but in that of our own.”

The Consul, not knowing what the real import of the visit might portend, so to speak felt his adversary’s blade, telling him he was welcome, and that at all times his tent and house were at the disposition of his friend.  Clapping his hands he called for tea, and when it came, the little flowered and gold-rimmed glasses, set neatly in a row, the red tin box with two compartments, one for the tea and one for the blocks of sugar, the whole surrounding the small dome-shaped pewter teapot, all placedin order on the heavy copper tray, he waved the equipage towards the Sherif, tacitly recognising his superiority in the art of tea-making.  Seated beside each other on a mattress they drank the sacramental three cups of tea, and then, after the Consul had lit his cigarette, the Sherif having refused one with a gesture of his hand and a half-murmured “Haram”—that is, “It is prohibited”—they then began to talk.

Much had they got to say about the price of barley and the drought; of tribal fights; of where our Lord the Sultan was, and if he had reduced the rebels in the hills,—matters that constitute the small talk of the tents, just as the weather and the fashionable divorce figure in drawing-rooms.  Knowing what was expected of him, the Consul touched on European politics, upon inventions, the progress that the French had made upon the southern frontier of Algeria; and as he thus unpacked his news with due prolixity, the Sherif now and again interjected one or another of those pious phrases, such as “Allah is merciful,” or “God’s ways are wonderful,” which at the same time show the interjector’s piety, and give the manwho is discoursing time to collect himself, and to prepare another phrase.

After a little conversation languished, and the two men who knew each other well sat listlessly, the Consul smoking and the Sherif passing the beads of a cheap wooden rosary between the fingers of his right hand, whilst with his left he waved a cotton pocket handkerchief to keep away the flies.

Looking up at his companion, “Consul,” he said, for he had now dropped the Ambassador with which he first had greeted him, “you know us well, you speak our tongue; even you know Shillah, the language of the accursed Berbers, and have translated Sidi Hammo into the speech of Nazarenes-I beg your pardon—of the Rumi,” for he had seen a flush rise on the Consul’s cheek.

“You like our country, and have lived in it for more than twenty years.  I do not speak to you about our law, for every man cleaves to his own, but of our daily life.  Tell me now, which of the two makes a man happier, the law of Sidna Aissa, or that of our Prophet, God’s own Messenger?”

He stopped and waited courteously, playingwith his naked toes, just as a European plays with his fingers in the intervals of speech.

The Consul sent a veritable solfatara of tobacco smoke out of his mouth and nostrils, and laying down his cigarette returned no answer for a little while.

Perchance his thoughts were wandering towards the cities brilliant with light—the homes of science and of art.  Cities of vain endeavour in which men pass their lives thinking of the condition of their poorer brethren, but never making any move to get down off their backs.  He thought of London and of Paris and New York, the dwelling-places both of law and order, and the abodes of noise.  He pondered on their material advancement: their tubes that burrow underneath the ground, in which run railways carrying their thousands all the day and far into the night; upon their hospitals, their charitable institutions, their legislative assemblies, and their museums, with their picture-galleries, their theatres—on the vast sums bestowed to forward arts and sciences, and on the poor who shiver in their streets and cower under railway arches in the dark winter nights.

As he sat with his cigarette smouldering beside him in a little brazen pan, the night breeze brought the heavy scent of orange blossoms, for it was spring, and all the gardens of the sanctuary each had its orange grove.  Never had they smelt sweeter, and never had the croaking of the frogs seemed more melodious, or the cricket’s chirp more soothing to the soul.

A death’s-head moth whirred through the tent, poising itself, just as a humming-bird hangs stationary probing the petals of a flower.  The gentle murmur of its wings brought back the Consul’s mind from its excursus in the regions of reality, or unreality, for all is one according to the point of view.

“Sherif,” he said, “what you have asked me I will answer to the best of my ability.

“Man’s destiny is so precarious that neither your law nor our own appear to me to influence it, or at the best but slightly.

“One of your learned Talebs, or our men of science, as they call themselves, with the due modesty of conscious worth, is passing down a street, and from a house-top slips a tile and falls upon his head.  There he lies huddled up, an ugly bundle of old clothes, inert andshapeless, whilst his immortal soul leaves his poor mortal body, without which all its divinity is incomplete; then perhaps after an hour comes back again, and the man staggering to his feet begins to talk about God’s attributes, or about carrying a line of railroad along a precipice.”

The Sherif, who had been listening with the respect that every well-bred Arab gives to the man who has possession of the word, said, “It was so written.  The man could not have died or never could have come to life again had it not been Allah’s will.”

His friend smiled grimly and rejoined, “That is so; but as Allah never manifests his will, except in action, just as we act towards a swarm of ants, annihilating some and sparing others as we pass, it does not matter very much what Allah thinks about, as it regards ourselves.”

“When I was young,” slowly said the Sherif, “whilst in the slave trade far away beyond the desert, I met the pagan tribes.

“They had no God . . . like Christians. . .  Pardon me, I know you know our phrase: nothing but images of wood.

“Those infidels, who, by the way, were just as apt at a good bargain as if their fathers all had bowed themselves in Christian temple or in mosque, when they received no answer to their prayers, would pull their accursed images down from their shrines, paint them jet black, and hang them from a nail.

“Heathens they were, ignorant even of the name of God, finding their heaven and their hell here upon earth, just like the animals, but . . . sometimes I have thought not quite bereft of reason, for they had not the difficulties you have about the will of Allah and the way in which he works.

“They made their gods themselves, just as we do,” and as he spoke he lowered his voice and peered out of the tent door; “but wiser than ourselves they kept a tight hand on them, and made their will, as far as possible, coincide with their own.

“It is the hour of prayer. . . .

“How pleasantly the time passes away conversing with one’s friends”; and as he spoke he stood erect, turning towards Mecca, as mechanically as the needle turns towards the pole.

His whole appearance altered and his mean presence suffered a subtle change.  With eyes fixed upon space, and hands uplifted, he testified to the existence of the one God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Bounteous, the Generous One, who alone giveth victory.

Then, sinking down, he laid his forehead on the ground, bringing his palms together.  Three times he bowed himself, and then rising again upon his feet recited the confession of his faith.

The instant he had done he sat him down again; but gravely and with the air of one who has performed an action, half courteous, half obligatory, but refreshing to the soul.

The Consul, who well knew his ways, and knew that probably he seldom prayed at home, and that the prayers he had just seen most likely were a sort of affirmation of his neutral attitude before a stranger, yet was interested.

Then, when the conversation was renewed, he said to him, “Prayer seems to me, Sherif, to be the one great difference between the animals and man.

“As to the rest, we live and die, drink, eat, and propagate our species, just as they do;but no one ever heard of any animal who had addressed himself to God.”

A smile flitted across the pock-marked features of the descendant of the Prophet, and looking gravely at his friend,—

“Consul,” he said, “Allah to you has given many things.  He has endowed you with your fertile brains, that have searched into forces which had remained unknown in nature since the sons of Adam first trod the surface of the earth.  All that you touch you turn to gold, and as our saying goes, ‘Gold builds a bridge across the sea.’

“Ships, aeroplanes, cannons of monstrous size, and little instruments by which you see minutest specks as if they were great rocks; all these you have and yet you doubt His power.

“To us, the Arabs, we who came from the lands of fire in the Hejaz and Hadramut.  We who for centuries have remained unchanged, driving our camels as our fathers drove them, eating and drinking as our fathers ate and drank, and living face to face with God. . . .  Consu’, you should not smile, for do we not live closer to Him than you do, under the starsat night, out in the sun by day, our lives almost as simple as the lives of animals?  To us He has vouchsafed gifts that He either has withheld from you, or that you have neglected in your pride.

“Thus we still keep our faith. . . .  Faith in the God who set the planets in their courses, bridled the tides, and caused the palm to grow beside the river so that the traveller may rest beneath its shade, and resting, praise His name.

“You ask me, who ever heard of any animal that addressed himself to God.  He in His infinite power . . . be sure of it . . . is He not merciful and compassionate, wonderful in His ways, harder to follow than the track that a gazelle leaves in the desert sands; it cannot be that He could have denied them access to His ear?

“Did not the lizard, Consul . . ., Hamed el Angri, the runner, the man who never can rest long in any place, but must be ever tightening his belt and pulling up his slippers at the heel to make ready for the road . . ., did he not tell you of El Hokaitsallah, the little lizard who, being late upon the day whenAllah took away speech from all the animals, ran on the beam in the great mosque at Mecca, and dumbly scratched his prayer?”

The Consul nodded.  “Hamed el Angri,” he said, “no doubt is still upon the road, by whose side he will die one day of hunger or of thirst. . . .  Yes; he told me of it, and I wrote it in a book. . . .”

“Write this, then,” the Sherif went on, “Allah in his compassion, and in case the animals, bereft of speech, that is in Arabic, for each has his own tongue, should not be certain of the direction of the Kiblah, has given the power to a poor insect which we call El Masgad to pray for all of them.  With its head turned to Mecca, as certainly as if he had the needle of the mariners, he prays at El Magreb.

“All day he sits erect and watches for his prey.  At eventide, just at the hour of El Magreb, when from the ‘alminares’ of the Mosques the muezzin calls upon the faithful for their prayers, he adds his testimony.

“Consu’, Allah rejects no prayer, however humble, and that the little creature knows.  He knows that Allah does not answer every prayer;but yet the prayer remains; it is not blotted out, and perhaps some day it may fructify, for it is written in the book.

“Therefore El Masgad prays each night for all the animals, yet being but a little thing and simple, it has not strength to testify at all the hours laid down in Mecca by our Lord Mohammed, he of the even teeth, the curling hair, and the grave smile, that never left his face after he had communed with Allah in the cave.”

The Consul dropped his smoked-out cigarette, and, stretching over to his friend, held out his hand to him.

“Sherif,” he said, “maybe El Masgad prays for you and me, as well as for its kind?”

The answer came: “Consu’, doubt not; it is a little animal of God, . . . we too are in His hand. . . .”

Thegreat Capilla, the largest in the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay, was built round a huge square, almost a quarter of a mile across.

Upon three sides ran the low, continuous line of houses, like a “row” in a Scotch mining village or a phalanstery designed by Prudhon or St. Simon in their treatises; but by the grace of a kind providence never carried out, either in bricks or stone.

Each dwelling-place was of the same design and size as all the rest.  Rough tiles made in the Jesuit times, but now weathered and broken, showing the rafters tied with raw hide in many places, formed the long roof, that looked a little like the pent-house of a tennis court.

A deep verandah ran in front, stretching from one end to the other of the square, supported on great balks of wood, which, after more than two hundred years and the assaults of weather and the all-devouring ants, still showed the adze marks where they had been dressed.  The timber was so hard that you could scarcely drive a nail into it, despite the flight of time since it was first set up.  Rings fixed about six feet from the ground were screwed into the pillars of the verandah, before every door, to fasten horses to, exactly as they are in an old Spanish town.

Against the wall of almost every house, just by the door, was set a chair or two of heavy wood, with the seat formed by strips of hide, on which the hair had formerly been left, but long ago rubbed off by use, or eaten by the ants.

The owner of the house sat with the back of the strong chair tilted against the wall, dressed in a loose and pleated shirt, with a high turned-down collar open at the throat, and spotless white duck trousers, that looked the whiter by their contrast with his brown, naked feet.

His home-made palm-tree hat was placedupon the ground beside him, and his cloak of coarse red baize was thrown back from his shoulders, as he sat smoking a cigarette rolled in a maize leaf, for in the Jesuit capillas only women smoked cigars.

At every angle of the square a sandy trail led out, either to the river or the woods, the little patches planted with mandioca, or to the maze of paths that, like the points outside a junction, eventually joined in one main trail, that ran from Itapua on the Paraná, up to Asuncion.

The church, built of wood cut in the neighbouring forest, had two tall towers, and followed in its plan the pattern of all the churches in the New World built by the Jesuits, from California down to the smallest mission in the south.  It filled the fourth side of the square, and on each side of it there rose two feathery palms, known as the tallest in the Missions, which served as landmarks for travellers coming to the place, if they had missed their road.  So large and well-proportioned was the church, it seemed impossible that it had been constructed solely by the Indians themselves, under the direction of the missionaries.

The overhanging porch and flight of steps that ran down to the grassy sward in the middle of the town gave it an air as of a cathedral reared to nature in the wilds, for the thick jungle flowed up behind it and almost touched its walls.

Bells of great size, either cast upon the spot or brought at vast expense from Spain, hung in the towers.  On this, the feast day of the Blessed Virgin, the special patron of the settlement, they jangled ceaselessly, the Indians taking turns to haul upon the dried lianas that served instead of ropes.  Though they pulled vigorously, the bells sounded a little muffled, as if they strove in vain against the vigorous nature that rendered any work of man puny and insignificant in the Paraguayan wilds.

Inside, the fane was dark, the images of saints were dusty, their paint was cracked, their gilding tarnished, making them look a little like the figures in a New Zealand pah, as they loomed through the darkness of the aisle.  On the neglected altar, for at that time priests were a rarity in the Reductions, the Indians had placed great bunches of red flowers, and now and then a humming-bird flitted in throughthe glassless windows and hung poised above them; then darted out again, with a soft, whirring sound.  Over the whole capilla, in which at one time several thousand Indians had lived, but now reduced to seventy or eighty at the most, there hung an air of desolation.  It seemed as if man, in his long protracted struggle with the forces of the woods, had been defeated, and had accepted his defeat, content to vegetate, forgotten by the world, in the vast sea of green.

On this particular day, the annual festival of the Blessed Virgin, there was an air of animation, for from far and near, from Jesuit capilla, from straw-thatched huts lost in the clearings of the primeval forest, from the few cattle ranches that then existed, and from the little town of Itapua, fifty miles away, the scanty population had turned out to attend the festival.

Upon the forest tracks, from earliest dawn, long lines of white-clad women, barefooted, with their black hair cut square across the forehead and hanging down their backs, had marched as silently as ghosts.  All of them smoked great, green cigars, and as theymarched along, their leader carrying a torch, till the sun rose and jaguars went back to their lairs, they never talked; but if a woman in the rear of the long line wished to converse with any comrade in the front she trotted forward till she reached her friend and whispered in her ear.  When they arrived at the crossing of the little river they bathed, or, at the least, washed carefully, and gathering a bunch of flowers, stuck them into their hair.  They crossed the stream, and on arriving at the plaza they set the baskets, which they had carried on their heads, upon the ground, and sitting down beside them on the grass, spread out their merchandise.  Oranges and bread, called “chipa,” made from mandioca flour and cheese, with vegetables and various homely sweetmeats, ground nuts, rolls of sugar done up in plaintain leaves, and known as “rapadura,” were the chief staples of their trade.  Those who had asses let them loose to feed; and if upon the forest trails the women had been silent, once in the safety of the town no flight of parrots in a maize field could have chattered louder than they did as they sat waiting by their wares.  Soon the square filled, and menarriving tied their horses in the shade, slackening their broad hide girths, and piling up before them heaps of the leaves of the palm called “Pindó” in Guarani, till they were cool enough to eat their corn.  Bands of boys, for in those days most of the men had been killed off in the past war, came trooping in, accompanied by crowds of women and of girls, who carried all their belongings, for there were thirteen women to a man, and the youngest boy was at a premium amongst the Indian women, who in the villages, where hardly any men were left, fought for male stragglers like unchained tigresses.  A few old men came riding in on some of the few native horses left, for almost all the active, little, undersized breed of Paraguay had been exhausted in the war.  They, too, had bands of women trotting by their sides, all of them anxious to unsaddle, to take the horses down to bathe, or to perform any small office that the men required of them.  All of them smoked continuously, and each of them was ready with a fresh cigarette as soon as the old man or boy whom they accompanied finished the stump he held between his lips.  The womenall were dressed in the long Indian shirt called a “tupoi,” cut rather low upon the breast, and edged with coarse black cotton lace, which every Paraguayan woman wore.  Their hair was as black as a crow’s back, and quite as shiny, and their white teeth so strong that they could tear the ears of corn out of a maize cob like a horse munching at his corn.

Then a few Correntino gauchos next appeared, dressed in their national costume of loose black merino trousers, stuffed into long boots, whose fronts were all embroidered in red silk.  Their silver spurs, whose rowels were as large as saucers, just dangled off their heels, only retained in place by a flat chain, that met upon the instep, clasped with a lion’s head.  Long hair and brown vicuna ponchos, soft black felt hats, and red silk handkerchiefs tied loosely round their necks marked them as strangers, though they spoke Guarani.

They sat upon their silver-mounted saddles, with their toes resting in their bell-shaped stirrups, swaying so easily with every movement that the word riding somehow or other seemed inapplicable to men who, like the centaurs, formed one body with the horse.

As they drew near the plaza they raised their hands and touched their horses with the spur, and, rushing like a whirlwind right to the middle of the square, drew up so suddenly that their horses seemed to have turned to statues for a moment, and then at a slow trot, that made their silver trappings jingle as they went, slowly rode off into the shade.

The plaza filled up imperceptibly, and the short grass was covered by a white-clad throng of Indians.  The heat increased, and all the time the bells rang out, pulled vigorously by relays of Indians, and at a given signal the people turned and trooped towards the church, all carrying flowers in their hands.

As there was no one to sing Mass, and as the organ long had been neglected, the congregation listened to some prayers, read from a book of Hours by an old Indian, who pronounced the Latin, of which most likely he did not understand a word, as if it had been Guarani.  They sang “Las Flores á Maria” all in unison, but keeping such good time that at a little distance from the church it sounded like waves breaking on a beach after a summer storm.

In the neglected church, where no priest ministered or clergy prayed, where all the stoops of holy water had for years been dry, and where the Mass had been well-nigh forgotten as a whole, the spirit lingered, and if it quickeneth upon that feast day in the Paraguayan missions, that simple congregation were as uplifted by it as if the sacrifice had duly been fulfilled with candles, incense, and the pomp and ceremony of Holy Mother Church upon the Seven Hills.

As every one except the Correntinos went barefooted, the exit of the congregation made no noise except the sound of naked feet, slapping a little on the wooden steps, and so the people silently once again filled the plaza, where a high wooden arch had been erected in the middle, for the sport of running at the ring.

The vegetable sellers had now removed from the middle of the square, taking all their wares under the long verandah, and several pedlars had set up their booths and retailed cheap European trifles such as no one in the world but a Paraguayan Indian could possibly require.  Razors that would not cut, and little looking-glasses in pewter frames made inThuringia, cheap clocks that human ingenuity was powerless to repair when they had run their course of six months’ intermittent ticking, and gaudy pictures representing saints who had ascended to the empyrean, as it appeared, with the clothes that they had worn in life, and all bald-headed, as befits a saint, were set out side by side with handkerchiefs of the best China silk.  Sales were concluded after long-continued chaffering—that higgling of the market dear to old-time economists, for no one would have bought the smallest article, even below cost price, had it been offered to him at the price the seller originally asked.

Enrique Clerici, from Itapua, had transported all his pulperia bodily for the occasion of the feast.  It had not wanted more than a small wagon to contain his stock-in-trade.  Two or three dozen bottles of square-faced gin of the Anchor brand, a dozen of heady red wine from Catalonia, a pile of sardine boxes, sweet biscuits, raisins from Malaga, esparto baskets full of figs, and sundry pecks of apricots dried in the sun and cut into the shape of ears, and hence called “orejones,” completed all his store.  He himself, tall andsunburnt, stood dressed in riding-boots and a broad hat, with his revolver in his belt, beside a pile of empty bottles, which he had always ready, to hurl at customers if there should be any attempt either at cheating or to rush his wares.  He spoke the curious lingo, half-Spanish, half-Italian, that so many of his countrymen use in the River Plate; and all his conversation ran upon Garibaldi, with whom he had campaigned in youth, upon Italia Irredenta, and on the time when anarchy should sanctify mankind by blood, as he said, and bring about the reign of universal brotherhood.

He did a roaring trade, despite the competition of a native Paraguayan, who had brought three demi-johns of Caña, for men prefer the imported article the whole world over, though it is vile, to native manufactures, even when cheap and good.

Just about twelve o’clock, when the sun almost burned a hole into one’s head, the band got ready in the church porch, playing upon old instruments, some of which may have survived from Jesuit times, or, at the least, been copied in the place, as the originals decayed.

Sackbuts and psalteries and shawms were there, with serpents, gigantic clarionets, and curiously twisted oboes, and drums, whose canvas all hung slack and gave a muffled sound when they were beaten, and little fifes, ear-piercing and devilish, were represented in that band.  It banged and crashed “La Palomita,” that tune of evil-sounding omen, for to its strains prisoners were always ushered out to execution in the times of Lopez, and as it played the players slowly walked down the steps.

Behind them followed the alcalde, an aged Indian, dressed in long cotton drawers, that at the knees were split into a fringe that hung down to his ankles, a spotless shirt much pleated, and a red cloak of fine merino cloth.  In his right hand he carried a long cane with a silver head—his badge of office.  Walking up to the door of his own house, by which was set a table covered with glasses and with homemade cakes, he gave the signal for the running at the ring.

The Correntino gauchos, two or three Paraguayans, and a German married to a Paraguayan wife, were all who entered for thesport.  The band struck up, and a young Paraguayan started the first course.  Gripping his stirrups tightly between his naked toes, and seated on an old “recao,” surmounted by a sheepskin, he spurred his horse, a wall-eyed skewbald, with his great iron spurs, tied to his bare insteps with thin strips of hide.  The skewbald, only half-tamed, reared once or twice and bounded off, switching its ragged tail, which had been half-eaten off by cows.  The people yelled, a “mosqueador!”—that is, a “fly-flapper,” a grave fault in a horse in the eyes of Spanish Americans—as the Paraguayan steered the skewbald with the reins held high in his left hand, carrying the other just above the level of his eyes, armed with a piece of cane about a foot in length.

As he approached the arch, in which the ring dangled from a string, his horse, either frightened by the shouting of the crowd or by the arch itself, swerved and plunged violently, carrying its rider through the thickest of the people, who separated like a flock of sheep when a dog runs through it, cursing him volubly.  The German came the next, dressed in his Sunday clothes, a slop-made suit of shoddycloth, riding a horse that all his spurring could not get into full speed.  The rider’s round, fair face was burned a brick-dust colour, and as he spurred and plied his whip, made out of solid tapir hide, the sweat ran down in streams upon his coat.  So intent was he on flogging, that as he neared the ring he dropped his piece of cane, and his horse, stopping suddenly just underneath the arch, would have unseated him had he not clasped it round the neck.  Shouts of delight greeted this feat of horsemanship, and one tall Correntino, taking his cigarette out of his mouth, said to his fellow sitting next to him upon his horse, “The very animals themselves despise the gringos.  See how that little white-nosed brute that he was riding knew that he was a ‘maturango,’ and nearly had him off.”

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