English style from the
postman, who is on horseback. The daily journal is brought to us by a
cavalier, who hands it in without dismounting; even a beggar-man rides
up every Saturday to solicit _Una limosna por el amor de Dios_, and he
has a license from the police in the shape of a piece of branded wood
suspended round his neck. The aristocracy of beggary is evident in this
fellow, too; for on one occasion, being offered cold meat and bread by
my servant, he rode off, indignantly saying he wanted money to buy
cigarritos.

_Horses making bricks!_ Ay, incredible as it may appear, there are the
very animals which dragged the dead bodies of their brethren to be made
fuel of at the brick-kilns before mentioned, now driven round and round
in a circus, tramping into malleable mud clay and water mixed together,
and doing everything in the brick-making except the moulding.

_Horses threshing corn!_ Here at our friend's estancia I see another
large circus, styled a _hera_, in which are placed several sheaves of
wheat, and into this are turned fifteen to twenty horses; a mounted man
goes in also, and drives these animals with whip and yell round the
circus until all the corn is threshed by their tramping.

_Horses churning butter!_ A novel sort of thing it is to see a bag made
of hides, into which the milk is put when it is turned sufficiently
sour; this bag, fastened to a long strip of rope-hide, is attached at
the other end to the leather girth which is round the horse's body; the
latter is then mounted by a gaucho, and ridden at a hard pace over the
camp for a sufficient length of time to secure the making of the butter,
by bumping the milk-bag against the ground.

A gaucho without his steed is an impracticability. To move his
furniture, consisting of beds, chairs, tables, crockery, or hardware,
the horse's back is fitted to the burden. Coffins are conveyed to the
burying-ground by being strapped transversely on a horse's loins; and
one would scarcely be surprised to hear of a specimen of the
semi-centaur under consideration going asleep or cooking his dinner on
horseback, more especially with the picture before us of a dentist
operating on a poor fellow's grinders, the patient and his physician
being both mounted.

No crusader of olden time could have borne himself more proudly at the
head of a gallant regiment bound to the Holy Land than does the gaucho,
who guides a troop of twenty to thirty carretas, each drawn by six