ded with fireplaces, and in cases where they do possess them
the chimneys are liable to smoke dreadfully when the north-west wind
sweeps over the city.

The natives, accustomed to these features of the rainy season in La
Plata, look with indifference on the forlorn condition of the stranger
within their gates, and the foreigner, thus left to struggle against the
coalition of the elements with the thoughtless or selfish indifference
of the native population, must resign himself with patience and
resignation until the three months of watery affliction shall have
passed away.

It was at a time when the reign of Pluvius was at its height, and Buenos
Ayres daily wept blinding tears, as it were, from every roof and gable
for its sins, that M. X----, the head of a commercial house in the city,
put a most welcome question to one of the attaches of the establishment,
M. Forgues, a Frenchman, who just then was suffering from the grievous
burden of ennui.

"See here," he said: "I want somebody to go up into Paraguay to collect
an outstanding debt. Are you the man for my purpose?"

M. Forgues readily accepted the commission, for as the head of the house
spoke a vision passed through his mind of Paraguay with its old Jesuit
missions, its mysterious and despotic dictators, and its legends of the
terrible war waged by Lopez against Brazil, the Argentine Confederation
and the Banda Oriental. And, moreover, the venture promised relief from
the horrors of the rainy season in Buenos Ayres.

When Francisco Solano Lopez, late president of Paraguay, fell on the
field on March 1, 1870, at the head of a few hundred followers, the
survivors of that courageous army of sixty thousand men with which in
1865 he had begun his five years' struggle, he had left behind him a
devastated country, a decimated people and an impoverished population.
It is to this land, almost remote enough from the pathway of our modern
civilization to partake of the mystery of an unknown interior; where
Nature has lavished her beauties with open hand; where a brilliant
vegetation alternates with noble forests, solitudes that have rarely
echoed the footfall of civilized man, and vast plains dotted with
palms--a country of mountainous reaches in which the jaguar roams at
will, of great lagoons, the home of a primitive race dwelling for the
most part in villages,--to this land it is that we shall follow M.
Forgues on his journey of more than a thousand miles, and see wit