nd three small children, who have just stepped ashore from two
boats made from the hollowed-out trunks of trees. Two dogs accompany
them. The adults of the party are clothed in rags. These people are
_monteros_, and are members of a tribe of gypsies who haunt the islands
of the Parana. They live a life of lordly independence, subsisting as
best they can, sleeping when fatigued wherever they may be when
drowsiness overtakes them, eating whatever comes to hand, drinking the
water of the river in the absence of anything stronger, and keeping
themselves warm by firing a forest from time to time. At the moment the
Republica hurries past they are preparing their evening meal, the
material for which, a _carpincho_, a sort of aquatic hog, lies at their
feet. The chief of the gypsy party stares at the steamer with bewildered
eyes, and at the noise made by the paddles a great terror seizes on a
colony of monkeys in the branches of the trees.

The town of La Goya, with a population of five thousand, is the next
place of importance reached. A few miles above this point is a famous
_saladero_, that of El Rincon de los Sotos (the "Fool's Corner"), which
belongs to a fellow-countryman of M. Forgues, and which, after the
_saladero_ of Baron Liebig in Uruguay, is the most extensive in the
valley of the Rio de la Plata. Here are slaughtered as many as fifteen
hundred head of cattle a day. Nor far distant from it is the
landing-place for the animals, a pretty spot which M. Forgues sketched
_en passant_.

The Republica is approaching Corrientes, the last of the Argentine towns
on the left bank of the Parana, and situated eighteen miles below the
point at which the Paraguay unites with that stream. Now alligators
appear, stretched lazily on the sand and basking in the sun, with their
ugly black bodies resembling logs partly submerged. The river assumes a
new aspect, widening into great sheets of water dotted with flat islands
lying far apart, and in its lake-like proportions justifying the
Guaranian meaning of its name--"like the sea." So far-reaching indeed
are these expanses of water that when a brisk south-east wind rises
large vessels in them roll and pitch as in the open bay. The belfries of
Corrientes will loom before the eyes of the company on the Republica at
ten o'clock the next morning, and in the mean time, and until the sun
shall rise, the steamer is moored before a small island. In that balmy
and odorous night myriads of insec