thence by water to Montevideo. The owner ordered the cow to be released,
and never, to her certain knowledge, had cow been milked since at La
Virgen de los Desamparados.

These ominous croakings produced no effect on me, and the next day I
returned to the subject. I did not possess a lasso, and so could not
undertake to capture a half-wild cow without assistance. One of my
fellow _agregados_ at length volunteered to help me, observing
that he had not tasted milk for several years, and was inclined to
renew his acquaintance with that singular beverage. This new-found
friend in need merits being formally introduced to the reader. His
name was Epifanio Claro. He was tall and thin, and had an idiotic
expression on his long, sallow face. His cheeks were innocent of
whiskers, and his lank, black hair, parted in the middle, fell to his
shoulders, enclosing his narrow face between a pair of raven's wings.
He had very large, light-coloured, sheepish-looking eyes, and his
eyebrows bent up like a couple of Gothic arches, leaving a narrow strip
above them that formed the merest apology for a forehead. This facial
peculiarity had won for him the nickname of Cejas (Eyebrows), by which
he was known to his intimates. He spent most of his time strumming on
a wretched old cracked guitar, and singing amorous ballads in a
lugubrious, whining falsetto, which reminded me not a little of that
hungry, complaining gull I had met at the _estancia_ in Durazno.
For, though poor Epifanio had an absorbing passion for music, Nature
had unkindly withheld from him the power to express it in a manner
pleasing to others. I must, however, in justice to him, allow that he
gave a preference to ballads or compositions of a thoughtful, not to
say metaphysical, character. I took the trouble of translating the
words of one literally, and here they are: