The dwellers in this region have a character no less distinctive than that of the Plains themselves. At long intervals, sometimes scores of miles apart, their habitations are established; but their home is the saddle. Innumerable herds of cattle and of horses turn to account the pasturage of the rich savanna; and the true Llanero exists only as guardian or proprietor of these savage hosts. He is as much at home in this trackless expanse of rank vegetation as the mariner navigating a familiar sea. There are no roads in the Llanos; but he can gallop unerringly to any given point, be it hundreds of miles away. There are no boundaries to the huge estates; but he knows when the cattle he is set to protect are grazing upon their own territory or upon that of a neighbor. He leads a life in which the extremes of solitariness and of activity are combined. Separated from his nearest neighbor by a journey of half a day, visited only rarely at his _hato_ or farm-house by some casual traveller, or by the itinerant Galician peddler, whom he contemptuously denominates the _merca-chifles_, the silent horseman lives wrapt up in ignorance of all but the care of the roving beasts that are intrusted to his vigilance. Let us glance somewhat more nearly at the Llanero in his home. If we are able to obtain an elevated view of the savanna,--let us say, in the Llanos which constitute the Province of Barinas, and through which the Apure rolls its rapid current to swell the volume of the Orinoco,--we shall observe, at distant intervals upon the plain, irregular groups of palm-trees surmounting the wavy level of the grass. These isolated clumps or groves, called _matas_ in the provincial idiom, form the landmarks of the Venezuelan Plains; and in the neighborhood of each we shall find the _hato_ or dwelling of a Llanero. The building, we shall find in every case, is a roughly-constructed hut, consisting of a floor raised a couple of feet above the spongy soil, and covered with a steep roof of palm-branches, with perhaps a thatch composed of the leaves of the same invaluable tree. A rough partition of mud-plastered twigs divides the Llanero's dwelling into unequal apartments; the lesser being reserved for the use of the females of the household, while the larger, furnished with half-a-dozen hides, the skin of a jaguar, and a couple of benches or stools ingeniously manufactured from bamboo, is the general reception-room, sleeping-apartment, and workshop for the _hatero_, when the floods are out, or when he takes a fancy at other times to shelter his head beneath a roof. A few rods from the dwelling is the _corral_ or cattle-pen, a large oval inclosure, into which, at irregular intervals, he drives his herds for purposes of branding or enumeration; and near the _corral_ two or three impatient horses, shackled with a thong confining the forelegs, are grazing.