THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF _NEW WORKS_.

* * * * *


A TUCUMANESE SCHOOLMASTER.

The following day, July the 5th, we pursued our journey, intending to
breakfast at a village very pleasantly situated, called Vinará, six
leagues from the river of Santiago, and remarkable for the appearance
of industry which it presented. No one here seemed to live in idleness;
the women, even while gazing at our carriage, were spinning away at
the same time. I observed too, that here the cochineal plant spread
a broader leaf, and flourished with greater luxuriance in the gardens
and hedge-rows of the cottages around, than at any place I had before
visited. "Industry is the first step to improvement, and education
follows hard upon it," thought I, as on foot, attracted by a busy hum
of voices, we made our way through an intervening copse towards the
spot whence it seemed to come. A fig-tree, the superincumbent branches
of which shaded a wide circuit of ground, arrested our progress; and
looking through an opening among the large green leaves, we espied
the village pedagogue, elevated on his authoritative seat, which was
attached to the trunk of the tree. He was reading a lecture on the heads
of his scholars--a phrenological dissertation, if one might judge from
its effects, with a wand long enough to bump the _caput_ of the
most remote offender. I began to think myself in some European district,
certainly not from the late samples I had seen of the country, in the
heart of the Columbian continent. There, however, I was in reality, and
in the fine province of Tucuman, with nearly half the globe's surface
between Europe and myself. The picture was a very striking one occurring