The sense of loneliness, the yearning for society, the longing to be restored to the sympathy of human beings which beset one in these solitudes, can only be understood by experience. I doubtless felt these the more from my youth and the want of that stern habit of self-reliance which is acquired by men who pursue a life of hazard and adventure. But I was becoming trained in the school of experience, and day by day was learning to sustain myself with my own thoughts, plans and prospects. We met few travellers upon the road. Four men on horseback, and a company with two vehicles, were all that we encountered in a distance of more than 500 miles. The latter consisted of some five and twenty persons. They had a baggage cart, which was a capacious, rude uncouth-looking vehicle, with cane sides and a roof covered with hides. The body was balanced upon two prodigiously high wheels for the convenience of passing through rivers. The other vehicle was a long coach, called a _galera_, and resembled the modern omnibus; the seats ran sideways, and the door was at the end. To each of these carriages there were four horses, and a postilion to each horse. Such is the ordinary equipment of travellers upon the Pampas. The post houses upon the road were miserable tenements, generally of mud, and affording scanty accommodation. The lazy inhabitants seem to offer the commonest civility with reluctance or languid indifference. We occasionally met with huts inhabited by squalid Indians, who seemed sunk in indolence and apathy. They were nearly naked, yet they possessed a gentle and kindly character. The herds of cattle upon the plains furnish them abundance of meat, and they parted with it freely, seeming to be almost indifferent whether they received compensation or not. At the end of twenty days, we reached the verge of the Pampas, and now began to ascend the highlands, which rise by gradations for the distance of nearly two hundred miles, at the foot of the Andes. Industriously pursuing our journey, we rose step by step, and at last reached a village situated in a deep gorge at the foot of mountains that seemed to reach the skies. Here we sold our horses, and purchased mules, these animals being considered safer in climbing the dizzy precipices, over which our road now lay.