Amongst the other good qualities of the married people amongst the Abipones, may be reckoned the tender affection which they display towards their offspring, in feeding, clothing, and taking care of them. To tutor the boys from their earliest age in the arts of riding, swimming, hunting, and fighting, is the chief care of the fathers. The girls are diligently instructed by their mothers in the domestic duties of females, and early inured to labour and in accommodation. But this is worthy of censure in them, that however disobedient or refractory their children may be, they never have the courage to correct them with a word, much less with a blow. Alaykin, chief Cacique of the town of Concepçion, whenever he visited me, held a little boy five years of age upon his lap. This child, who was as restless as a young ape, would sometimes pull his father's nose or his hair, and sometimes struck his face. The old man, pleased at this, would cry—"Look, Father! can you ever doubt that this fearless boy will sometime come to be a famous soldier or captain, since he is not afraid of me, a leader so victorious and so formidable to the Spaniards?" The same boy would throw bones, horns, or any thing else he could lay hold on, at his mother, when she came to call him home. The warlike father interpreted the child's insolence, which he ought to have punished, as the mark of an intrepid mind, and rewarded it with laughter, and even with praise. The too unbounded love which they bear their children incapacitates the savages from doing any thing to cause them pain. But every one knows that the immoderate fondness of parents is a frequent injury to children in Europe. CHAPTER XX. GAMES ON THE BIRTH OF THE MALE CHILD OF A CACIQUE.