We will go back to the point we started
from--your father's _estancia_, for the sooner this meeting you
are thinking about so anxiously is over the better will it be for all
of us."
APPENDIX
HISTORY OF THE BANDA ORIENTAL
The country, called in this work the Purple Land, was discovered by
Magellan in the year 1500, and he called the hill, or mountain, which
gives its name to the capital, Monte Vidi. He described it as a
hat-shaped mountain; and it is probable that, four centuries ago, the
tall, conical hat, which is worn to this day by women in South Wales,
was a common form in Spain and Portugal.
In due time settlements were made; but the colonists of those days
loved gold and adventure above everything, and, finding neither in the
Banda, they little esteemed it. For two centuries it was neglected by
its white possessors, while the cattle they had imported continued to
multiply, and, returning to a feral life, overran the country in amazing
numbers.
The heroic period in South American history then passed away. El Dorado,
the Spaniard's New Jerusalem, has changed into a bank of malarious
mist and a cloud of mosquitoes, Amazons, giants, pigmies.
"The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,"
when closely looked for, turned out to be Red Indians of a type which
varied but little throughout the entire vast continent.
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