After this the barber draws his chair out to the causeway and shaves or cuts his customer's hair. Women and children sit at their doors drinking máté and watching the slowly drawn bullock-carts go up and down the uneven, unmade roads, bordered, not by the familiar maple, but with huge dust-covered cactus plants, The bullocks all draw with their horns, and the indolent driver sits on the yoke, urging forward his sleepy animals with a poke of his cane, on the end of which he has fastened a sharp nail. The _buey_ is very thick-skinned and would not heed a whip. The wheels of the cart are often cut from a solid piece of wood, and are fastened on with great hardwood pins in a most primitive style. Soon after sunset all retire to their trestle beds. In early morning the women hurry to mass. The Criollo does not break his fast until nearly mid-day, so they have no early meal to prepare. Even before it is quite light it is difficult to pass along the streets owing to the custom they have of carrying their praying-chairs with them to mass. The rich lady will be followed by her dark-skinned maid bearing a sumptuously upholstered chair on her head. The middle classes carry their own, and the very poor take with them a palm-leaf mat of their own manufacture. When mass is over religion is over for the day. After service they make their way down to the river or pond, carrying on their heads the soiled linen. Standing waist-high in the water, they wash out the stains with black soap of their own manufacture, beating each article with hardwood boards made somewhat like a cricketer's bat. The cloths are then laid on the sand or stones of the shore. The women gossip and smoke until these are dry and ready to carry home again ere the heat becomes too intense. In a description of Argentine village life, I could not possibly omit the priest, the "all in all" to the native, the temporal and spiritual king, who bears in his hands the destinies of the living and the dead. These men are the potentates of the people, who refer everything to them, from the most trivial matter to the weightier one of the saving of their souls after death. Bigotry and superstition are extreme. Renous, the naturalist, tells us that he visited one of these towns and left some caterpillars with a girl. These she was to feed until his return, that they might change to butterflies. When this was rumored through the village, priest and governor consulted together and agreed that it must be black heresy. When poor Renous returned some time afterwards he was arrested.