young women, some of them very handsome.  The music is of the modest kind that might be expected from a clarionet and a guitar.  The majority of the participants come to the house with their chairs on their heads.  The dances are the polka, the waltz, quadrilles, including the Lancers, and two or three native dances called La Polomila, the Dondon Karape and La Santa Fe, which are accompanied with graceful poses, while the women, as they dance, snap their fingers in imitation of castanets.  While the dance is in progress the good and hospitable Vicente remains outside to fire off his gun at intervals with the view of frightening away the jaguars, one of these animals having been killed only eight days before in the very room wherein the revelers are enjoying themselves.  Before taking leave of the brave Fleytas, M. Forgues is regaled with several jaguar stories which doubtless admirably prepare him for the remainder of his journey through forest and jungle.

The next morning he bids the patriarch farewell.  On the women and children of the family, grouped in front of the house, he bestows a benediction with the utterance of a “Peace be with you!” Then with his Swiss acquaintance he rides away, to return not to Villa Rica, but to Paraguari, on his way to Asuncion.  His course lies nearly due west, and for six leagues he rides through a beautiful country, but on a road so muddy that the horses sink up to the saddle-girths.  He tarries for dinner at the estancia of another Paraguayan, Don Matias Ramirez—­not as rich a man, but as hospitable a host, as Don Vicente—­who spreads before his guests for dinner a simple repast of boiled turnips and small manioc doughnuts.  But before reaching the estancia our traveler has had the good fortune to shoot three large birds of the pheasant variety called mutus, and thus the humble board of Don Matias is graced with meat, a rare commodity in those parts.

After a short siesta—­as much an institution in Paraguay as dinner itself—­M.  Forgues pushes forward, furnished with a youthful guide mounted on a mule whom Don Matias has bidden accompany him.  For six hours the route lies through a virgin forest composed of orange, cedar and other trees, mingled with dense thorny thickets, trunks of decayed trees and a twisted network of climbers.  The passage through this forest is attended with many vexatious incidents, owing to the difficulty experienced in making a way through the undergrowth and thickly-growing climbers.  After having his spectacles, his maps, his gun and his hat jerked from him, M. Forgues himself is pulled from his horse.  The horses are attacked by a multitude of small yellow flies, which sting them unmercifully in the nostrils, the ears and in whatever part of their bodies the animals cannot reach with their tails, so that, maddened with pain, they break into a fierce gallop to avoid the pest, carrying their riders in their course along the edge of a hole in the ground in which swarms about a bushel of small snakes of a bright green color.  When the party finally emerge from this beautiful but inhospitable forest, their clothes are hanging in rags about their persons, and their faces and hands are covered with scratches caused by the thorns.