We fortunately gained the Alagon just as the ferry-boat was preparing to leave the bank, and, about ten o'clock, got safe into the village, after all our hair-breadth chances, without having had an interview with the outlawed wanderers, who had acted wisely in keeping at an awful distance, and not hazarding an attack upon our well-armed and formidable party. The peasantry of Monte Hermosa are a quiet industrious race, the men are robust, black-looking fellows; their clothing is of brown cloth, over which is thrown a sort of leather covering, with an aperture for the head, worn to save the garments while occupied in the employment of wood-cutting. The women, in consequence of the ample folds of their numerous cloth coats, are wondrously capacious in the middle and lower regions, and display as prominent a rotundity as the Hottentot Venus. Had _circular sterns_ been then fashionable in our navy, Sir Robert Seppings might have selected excellent models from among the females of Monte Hermosa. The inhabitants, old and young, usually assembled after sunset in front of their houses, for the purpose of amusing themselves in a variety of ways. Their music is that of the bandeiro, a clumsy instrument, somewhat resembling a tambourine, though of a square form; it is generally played on by some ill-favoured sybil, who, beating the parchment with her skinny palm, produces a dull monotonous sound. When this is accompanied by a brace of similar hideous gorgons, catterwauling in doleful strains, the concert thus produced is not of such a very tender nature as "to soften rocks or bend the knotted oak," but a heavy hum-drum piece of discord, not unlike a funeral howl, each stanza being finished with a tedious drone by way of chorus, which has a strong relationship to the Scotch bag-pipes, and serves the purpose of a narcotic upon the admiring spectators. To this delightful harmony do the rustics trip, not on "the light fantastic toe," but with a pavior's tread, slowly moving their limbs; the stupid, sleepy and inanimate clodpoles waving at the same time their hands from side to side, in a pendulous manner, and seeming ready to fall into the arms of their equally lifeless partner. CHAPTER XVI.