During the evening two or three young men--neighbours, I imagine, who
were paying their addresses to the young ladies of the establishment--
dropped in; and after a plentiful supper, we had singing and dancing to
the music of the guitar, on which every member of the family--excepting
the babies--could strum a little.
About eleven o'clock I retired to rest, and, stretching myself on my
rude bed of rugs, in a room adjoining the kitchen, I blessed these
simple-minded, hospitable people. Good heavens, thought I to myself,
what a glorious field is waiting here for some new Theocritus! How
unutterably worn out, stilted, and artificial seems all the so-called
pastoral poetry ever written when one sits down to supper and joins
in the graceful _Cielo_ or _Pericon_ in one of these remote,
semi-barbarous South American _estancias_! I swear I will turn poet
myself, and go back some day to astonish old _blase_ Europe with
something so--so--What the deuce was that? My sleepy soliloquy was
suddenly brought to a most lame and impotent conclusion, for I had
heard a sound of terror--the unmistakable _zz-zzing_ of an insect's
wings. It was the hateful _vinchuca_. Here was an enemy against
which British pluck and six-shooters are of no avail, and in whose
presence one begins to experience sensations which are not usually
supposed to enter into the brave man's breast.
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