Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/162



132 MONTEVIDEANS :

Honourable Mr. Washburn. Men said that lie should have awaited fresh orders from home^ as Marshal-President Lopezj being a fugitive, had no regular capital. This was an error. The transfers from Asuncion to Luque, and from Luque to Paraguary, were officially announced in the Semanario gazette, and they were effected with all due formalities.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bliss, returning to New York, retracted in the New York Tribune (February 27, 1869) all that he had written, and declared that he had done so under penalty of the Cepo Uruguayana. There are sundry kinds of Cepos or stocks in Paraguay. The Cepo de laso is when a cord fastened to two stakes is rove round the patient's ankles. The Uruguayana, a slang name, is the " bucking^' of Negro overseers : the arms are tied round the knees, under which a stick is thrust, and the man is thus made into a bundle â€” it is the position in which children play at cock-fighting. The Cepo Columbia is the worst of all : it is " bundling,^' with the addition of hea'vy weights, muskets, and other things placed upon the back of the neck, and pro- ducing dangerous wounds. We read of such things in a Car- melite convent near Cracow, where the penitents must carry crosses weighing eighty kilogs. Mr. Masterman also lost no time in publishing an '^ interesting narrative,^' which sounds like the dropping of tears â€” a true " pleurnicherie bour- geoise.^'

After this you will wonder why the foreigners who, when much less numerous, prevented the ^' savage Oribe^' from bombarding Monte Video, do not combine to put down the revolutionary native politician â€” why, in fact, they do not take the government into their own hands.

better than his letter.
 * Mr. Masterman has since that time published a book which reads far