ir unmanageable floods turn it for thousands of miles
into a lake.

The dwellers in this region have a character no less distinctive than
that of the Plains themselves. At long intervals, sometimes scores of
miles apart, their habitations are established; but their home is the
saddle. Innumerable herds of cattle and of horses turn to account the
pasturage of the rich savanna; and the true Llanero exists only as
guardian or proprietor of these savage hosts. He is as much at home in
this trackless expanse of rank vegetation as the mariner navigating
a familiar sea. There are no roads in the Llanos; but he can gallop
unerringly to any given point, be it hundreds of miles away. There are
no boundaries to the huge estates; but he knows when the cattle he is
set to protect are grazing upon their own territory or upon that of a
neighbor. He leads a life in which the extremes of solitariness and of
activity are combined. Separated from his nearest neighbor by a journey
of half a day, visited only rarely at his _hato_ or farm-house by
some casual traveller, or by the itinerant Galician peddler, whom he
contemptuously denominates the _merca-chifles_, the silent horseman
lives wrapt up in ignorance of all but the care of the roving beasts
that are intrusted to his vigilance.

Let us glance somewhat more nearly at the Llanero in his home. If we
are able to obtain an elevated view of the savanna,--let us say, in the
Llanos which constitute the Province of Barinas, and through which the
Apure rolls its rapid current to swell the volume of the Orinoco,--we
shall observe, at distant intervals upon the plain, irregular groups
of palm-trees surmounting the wavy level of the grass. These isolated
clumps or groves, called _matas_ in the provincial idiom, form the
landmarks of the Venezuelan Plains; and in the neighborhood of each we
shall find the _hato_ or dwelling of a Llanero. The building, we shall
find in every case, is a roughly-constructed hut, consisting of a floor
raised a couple of feet above the spongy soil, and covered with a steep
roof of palm-branches, with perhaps a thatch composed of the leaves
of the same invaluable tree. A rough partition of mud-plastered twigs
divides the Llanero's dwelling into unequal apartments; the lesser being
reserved for the use of the females of the household, while the larger,
furnished with half-a-dozen hides, the skin of a jaguar, and a couple of
benches or stools ingeniously manufactured fro