crackling sound of the furze seed-vessels which one hears in June in
England, only much louder.

To the gaucho who lives half his day on his horse and loves his
freedom as much as a wild bird, a thistle year was a hateful period of
restraint. His small, low-roofed, mud house was then too like a cage
to him, as the tall thistles hemmed it in and shut out the view on all
sides. On his horse he was compelled to keep to the narrow cattle
track and to draw in or draw up his legs to keep them from the long
pricking spines. In those distant primitive days the gaucho if a poor
man was usually shod with nothing but a pair of iron spurs.

By the end of November the thistles would be dead, and their huge
hollow stalks as dry and light as the shaft of a bird's feather--a
feather-shaft twice as big round as a broomstick and six to eight feet
long. The roots were not only dead but turned to dust in the ground,
so that one could push a stalk from its place with one finger, but it
would not fall since it was held up by scores of other sticks all
round it, and these by hundreds more, and the hundreds by thousands
and millions. The thistle dead was just as great a nuisance as the
thistle living, and in this dead dry condition they would sometimes
stand all through December and January when the days were hottest and
the danger of fire was ever present to people's minds. At any moment a
careless spark from a cigarette might kindle a dangerous blaze. At
such times the sight of smoke in the distance would cause every man
who saw it to mount his horse and fly to the danger-spot, where an
attempt would be made to stop the fire by making a broad path in the
thistles some fifty to a hundred yards ahead of it. One way to make
the path was to lasso and kill a few sheep from the nearest flock and
drag them up and down at a gallop through the dense thistles until a