ly to protect it from the intensity of the sun's rays; but
the constant habit of wearing it has rendered the handkerchief as
indispensable a head-dress to the Llaneros as is the cravat to the neck
of the city gentleman.

[The traveller proceeds with further details of the life of
these people, and with an account of their half-savage method
of slaughtering their cattle; which we can well omit for a more
general descriptive passage.]

The people inhabiting the vast region of the Llanos, although claiming
descent from the old Castilian race, once the rulers of the land, are,
in fact, an amalgamation of the various castes composing the present
population of the republic. These are the whites, or the descendants
of the European settlers of the country; the aboriginals or Indians,
and a great portion of blacks. In most of the towns the native whites
preponderate over all others, and represent the wealth as well as the
most respectable portion of the community; in the villages and thinly
populated districts of the plains a mongrel breed, resulting from the
admixture of these three, constitute the majority of the inhabitants.
These are dispersed over an area of twenty-seven thousand square miles,
making a proportion of only fourteen individuals, out of a population
of three hundred and ninety thousand, to every square mile.

This race, although vastly inferior to the first in mental capacity and
moral worth, is endowed with a physique admirably adapted to endure the
fatigues of a life beset with dangers and hardships. Cast upon a wild
and apparently interminable plain, the domain of savage beasts and
poisonous reptiles, their lot has been to pass all their life in a
perpetual struggle, not only with the primitive possessors of the land,
but with the elements themselves, often as fierce as they are grand.
When it is not the alarm of the dreaded viper or the spotted jaguar, it
is the sudden inroad of vast inundations, which, spreading with fearful
rapidity over the land, sweep off in one moment their frail habitations
and their herds. Nevertheless this insecure existence, this continual
struggle between life and death, between rude intellect and matter, has
for the Llanero a sort of fascination, perhaps not so well understood by
people possessing the blessings and ideas of civilization, but without
which he could not exist, especially if deprived of his horse and cast
among the mountain region north of his