Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/307



A WEEK AT CORRIENTES. 277

men who did not know how to read/' What, however, can be expected here when in Spain, the mother country, out of 15,673,000, some 12,000,000 are unalphabetie ? D. Nicanor, an exalted " Federal appears in photographs like a thick- set little Cardiganshire peasant by the side of a Patagonian spouse. When I returned to Corrientes in April, 1869, both these rebels were clean forgotten. You are beginning to understand in England why the King of Naples was ex- pelled, why Otho I. fled from Greece, and why Queen Isabel found herself at Pau. But these South American "pronunciamento^^ movements are beyond even the traveller. Read, for instance, the history of Columbia, or even of New Granada.

The Gaucho and Gauchito are also here, lounging about on animals in correct native costume — flowers stuck behind the ears, ponchos, and chiripa- kilts, their short, stiffly- starched calzonzillos of white or scarlet stufi^ — hideous de- generacy from the broad flowing Turkish Shalwar — show the tops of civilized Wellingtons. All the montures are poor and many are hammer-headed — the horsemanship is better than the horse. The felt or straw head-covering alone distinguishes these people from the wild Indians of the Gran Chaco, who are paddled over every morning by their squaws in canoes, which they easily manage despite the current. They bring fruits, manioc, and billets of the wood nandubay, used for fuel. The staple of trade, however, is the " Chaco grass,'* coarse and thick as a wheat stalk, which, in the absence of alfalfa, serves to fatten cattle. The men disdain to do any- thing beyond loafing, drinking, and stalking about to sell bunches of ostrich feathers, for which they ask a dollar when the value is twenty cents. The Great Chaco swarms with rascals, and these are not exceptions. The pretty squaws are left behind, and the old women attain a pitch of ugliness unknown to civilization, which repau's the damages