that knives were used instead of beaks, confirmed and sunk them deeper
in their wild and barbarous manner of life.

Thus, too, the tree-clumps on the pampas were mostly remains of a
vanished past. To these clumps or plantations we shall return later on
when I come to describe the home life of some of our nearest
neighbours; here the houses only, with or without trees growing about
them, need be mentioned as parts of the landscape. The houses were
always low and scarcely visible at a distance of a mile and a half:
one always had to stoop on entering a door. They were built of burnt
or unburnt brick, more often clay and brushwood, and thatched with
sedges or bulrushes. At some of the better houses there would be a
small garden, a few yards of soil protected in some way from the
poultry and animals, in which a few flowers and herbs were grown,
especially parsley, rue, sage, tansy, and horehound. But there was no
other cultivation attempted, and no vegetables were eaten except
onions and garlic, which were bought at the stores, with bread, rice,
mate tea, oil, vinegar, raisins, cinnamon, pepper, cummin seed, and
whatever else they could afford to season their meat-pies or give a
flavour to the monotonous diet of cow's flesh and mutton and pig.
Almost the only game eaten was ostrich, armadillo, and tinamou (the
partridge of the country), which the boys could catch by snaring or
running them down. Wild duck, plover, and such birds they rarely or
never tasted, as they could not shoot; and as to the big rodent, the
vizcacha, which swarmed everywhere, no gaucho would touch its flesh,
although to my taste it was better than rabbit.

The summer change in the aspect of the plain would begin in November:
the dead dry grass would take on a yellowish-brown colour, the giant
thistle a dark rust brown, and at this season, from November to