manioc, the
plantain, and similar tropical products--all these insignia evinced the
care and cultivating hand of some one else than an aboriginal.

Entering the house, still further evidence of the white man's presence
would be observed. Furniture, apparently home-made, yet neat, pretty,
and suitable; chairs and settees of the _cana brava_, or South American
bamboo; bedsteads of the same, with beds of the elastic Spanish moss,
and _ponchos_ for coverlets; mats woven from fibres of another species
of palm, with here and there a swung hammock. In addition, some books
and pictures that appeared to have been painted on the spot; a bound
volume of music, with a violin and guitar--all speaking of a domestic
economy unknown to the American Indian.

In some of the rooms, as also in the outside verandah, could be noticed
objects equally unlike the belongings of the aboriginal: stuffed skins
of wild beasts and birds; insects impaled on strips of palm bark; moths,
butterflies, and brilliant scarabaei; reptiles preserved in all their
repulsive ugliness, with specimens of ornamental woods, plants, and
minerals; a singular paraphernalia, evidently the product of the region
around. Such a collection could only belong to a _naturalist_, and that
naturalist could be no other than a white man. He was; his name Ludwig
Halberger.

The name plainly speaks his nationality--a German. And such was he; a
native of the then kingdom of Prussia, born in the city of Berlin.

Though not strange his being a naturalist--since the taste for and study
of Nature are notably peculiar to the German people--it was strange to
find Prussian or other European having his home in such an
out-of-the-way place. There was no civilised settlement, no other white
man's dwelling, nearer than the town of Assuncion; this quite a hundred
miles off, to the eastward. And north, south, and west the same for
more than five times the distance. All the territory around and
between, a wilderness, unsettled, unexplored, traversed only by the
original lords of the soil, the Chaco Indians, who, as said, have
preserved a deadly hostility to the paleface, ever since the keels of
the latter first cleft the waters of the Parana.

To explain, then, how Ludwig Halberger came to be domiciled there, so
far from civilisation, and so high up the Pilcomayo--river of mysterious
note--it is necessary to give some details of his life antecedent to the
time of his having established