In the neighbourhood of these licensed occupiers of the pastures are others whose existence is more precarious. These are hares who race away at the advent of a train, and iguanas whose long tails stream behind them as they depart in a flurry. As for the ostriches, they have obviously come to the conclusion that their life is too short and their neck too long for any excitement of the kind. They are plainly bored by the advent of this noisy invention of man, and regard it languidly from the height of the two long legs that repose in a supercilious attitude. On through the undulating Campo, where the rain pools lie like dew ponds upon an English South Down, and where the banks of the intermittent streams of the cañadas thread in and out of the green grass for all the world like the bodies of black snakes. A company of deer are feeding peacefully in the distance, intermingled with the bulky members of a herd of cattle with whom the wild creatures have condescended to associate for the time being. The train has pulled up at Cardoso now, the centre of a district that is considerably more populous than the majority. The place was once the site of a German colony, and indeed the sole reasons why it does not remain so to this day must be laid at the doors of climate, surroundings, intermarriage, and the influence of all three. As it is, chastened by the all-powerful atmosphere of the spot, Teutonic features, customs, and language have already become modified almost to the extinction of the original type. The phenomenon affords only one more of the innumerable instances of the tremendous power of absorption that is latent in the South American continent. In contrast to the mutability of all things intrinsically human, the industry of the community remains the same as when the first colonists, strangers and foreigners, introduced it to the spot. Cheese-making is still the staple trade of Cardoso, and the district is not a little famed for the art. This particular neighbourhood, however, is to be noted for something of more enduring importance than cheese. It is here, indeed, that the soil of the land, after many tentative swellings, each more ambitious than the last, takes upon itself to change its outline in a determined and conclusive fashion. The universal, gentle swell of the undulations has given way to steeper walls of green surmounted by curiously level, flat surfaces. Thus the face of the Campo is now dotted, so far as the eye can reach, with a collection of table-lands, each separate and differing slightly from the rest in the details of its pattern, but each marvellously distinct and clearly cut. The feature is characteristic of central northern Uruguay, and is continued well beyond the frontier into Brazil.