By this time we had reached the gates of Bopicuá, and still seven miles lay between us and our camping-ground, with a fast-declining sun. As the horses passed the gate we counted them, an operation of some difficulty when time presses and the count is large. Nothing is easier than to miss animals, that is to say, for Europeans, however practised, but the lynx-eyed gauchos never are at fault. “Where is the little brown horse with a white face, and a bit broken out of his near forefoot?” they will say, and ten to one that horse is missing, for what they do not know about the appearance of a horse would not fill many books. Only a drove road lay between Bopicuá and the great pasture, at whose faraway extremity the horses were to sleep. When the last animal had passed and the great gates swung to, the young law student rode up to my side, and, looking at the “great tropilla,” as he called it, said, “_Morituri te salutant_. This is the last time they will feed in Bopicuá.” We turned a moment, and the falling sun lit up the undulating plain, gilding the cottony tufts of the long grasses, falling upon the dark-green leaves of the low trees around Parodi’s camp, glinting across the belt of wood that fringed the Uruguay, and striking full upon a white estancia house in Entre-Rios, making it appear quite close at hand, although four leagues away. Two or three hundred yards from the great gateway stood a little native hut, as unsophisticated, but for a telephone, as were the gaucho’s huts in Uruguay, as I remember them full thirty years ago. A wooden barrel on a sledge for bringing water had been left close to the door, at which the occupant sat drinking maté, tapping with a long knife upon his boot. Under a straw-thatched shelter stood a saddled horse, and a small boy upon a pony slowly drove up a flock of sheep. A blue, fine smoke that rose from a few smouldering logs and bones, blended so completely with the air that one was not quite sure if it was really smoke or the reflection of the distant Uruguay against the atmosphere.