hout his advice; he is worth, say his employers, a
dozen overseers. Ah, he is yet to rule on a larger scale!

Did these people ever think,--as they watched the sombre, stubborn Gaucho
sweating over a _tapia_, subjecting a drove of peons to his authority, or,
stretched upon a hide, growing ferocious as the luck went against him at
cards,--that here was one of those forces which mould or overturn the
world? Could it ever have occurred to the Godoys of San Juan, to the
worthy municipality of Mendoza, that this scowling savage was yet to place
his heel upon their prostrate forms, and most thoroughly to exhibit,
through weary, sanguinary years, the reality of that tremendous saying,--
"The State? _I_ am the State!"?

Doubtless no. Little as the comrades of Maximin imagined that the
truculent Goth was yet to wear the blood-stained purple, little as the
clients of Robespierre dreamed of the vortex toward which he was being
insensibly hurried by the stream of years, did the men, whose names are
thrown out from their obscurity by the glare of his misdeeds, conceive
that their fortunes, their lives, all things but their souls, were shortly
to depend upon the capricious breath of this servant who so quietly pounds
away upon their mud inclosures.

He does not long, however, remain the companion of peons. Eighteen hundred
and ten has come, bringing with it liberty, and bloodshed, and universal
discord. The sun of May beams down upon a desolated land. For the mild,
although repressive viceregal sway is substituted that of a swarm of
military chieftains, who, fighting as patriots against Liniers and his
ill-fated troops, as rivals with each other, or as _montanero_-freebooters
against all combined, swept the plains with their harrying lancers from
the seacoast to the base of the Cordillera.

In this period of anarchy we catch another glimpse of Juan Facundo. He has
worked his way down to Buenos Ayres, nine hundred miles from home, and
enlists in the regiment of _Arribenos_, raised by his countryman, General
Ocampo, to take part in the liberation of Chile. But even the
infinitesimal degree of discipline to which his fellow-soldiers had been
reduced was too much for his wild spirit; already he feels that command,
and not obedience, is his birthright; there is soon a vacancy in the
ranks.

With three companions Quiroga took to the desert. He was followed and
overtaken by an armed detachment, or _partida_; summoned to surrender; the