Notwithstanding the excessive nastiness and filth of their general habits, the women seldom failed to perform their daily ablutions, repairing the first thing in the morning to the neighbouring lake to bathe with their children, although the cold was so intense, that the snow nightly beat through their tents during the whole time the commissioners were there. Amongst these females were some Christian girls, captives, whose fair skin was but too strong evidence of their origin, and who seemed from habit to suffer as little from the severity of the cold as their dusky mistresses. Their unfortunate lot excited the strongest feelings on the part of the commissioners, whose interposition to obtain their liberation they pleaded for, as well they might, with tears and the most earnest entreaties. Nor were the officers backward in urging upon the Caciques every argument to induce them to give them up; but it was amongst the greatest of their disappointments to find all their efforts on this point unavailing. The Caciques declared they had no power in a case touching the spoils of war, which, according to their laws, were the sole property of the individual captors, to whom they referred them to make the best bargain they could. These brutes, on being applied to, demanded in general so extravagant a ransom as to destroy at once every hope on the part of the poor women themselves of its ever being raised, their relatives in general being of the labouring classes employed in the estancias on the frontier; in many cases they too were no longer in existence, having perished in the same inroads of the savages which had deprived them of their liberty. In expectation that the treaties to be made with the Indians would have led to the immediate liberation of all prisoners, some poor people had obtained leave to follow in the train of the commissioners, in the hope of finding their wives and daughters, and carrying them back with them; and a most affecting sight it was, as may well be imagined, to witness their meeting again, and tender embraces after so cruel a separation; but it was piteous indeed to behold their subsequent despair on finding that the interference of the commissioners was unavailing, and that the purchase-money demanded for the prisoners was totally beyond what they could ever hope to raise. The parting again of these poor people was perhaps one of the hardest trials to which human nature could be subjected. Husbands and fathers forced to leave their wives and daughters to the defilement of brutal savages, with scarce a hope of ever being able to obtain their release; it need hardly be said that force was necessary to separate them, and to restrain the men from acts of violence which might have compromised the safety of the whole party.