of the rights of man and the duties of hospitality, he generally presented you
with a heavy bill for Indian corn and `pindo'* which your horse had eaten.
In the former, usually he bade you go with God, and, if you spoke of payment,
said: `Well, send me a book of Hours when you get to Asuncion.'

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* `Cocos Australis'.
--

Of Indians, hardly any were left to judge of, for in the villages in which,
according to the reports furnished to Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres
at the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits, the population numbered
in the thirty towns of the missions one hundred and twenty thousand,*
a population of at most twenty thousand was to be found.
On every side the powerful vegetation had covered up the fields.
On ruined church and chapel, and on broken tower, the lianas climbed
as if on trees, creeping up the belfries, and throwing
great masses of scarlet and purple flowers out of the apertures
where once were hung the bells. In the thick jungles a few half-wild cattle
still were to be found. The vast `estancias', where once
the Jesuits branded two and three thousand calves a year,
and from whence thousands of mules went forth to Chile and Bolivia,
were all neglected. Horses were scarce and poor, crops few and indifferent,
and the plantations made by the Jesuits of the tree (`Ilex Paraguayensis')
from which is made the `yerba mate', were all destroyed.

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* See the reports of the Marques de Valdelirios and others
in the publications of Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872,
and in the `Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay,