With this intent let us transport ourselves in imagination to the Llanos or Plains of Venezuela.  It is a region similar in some respects, widely dissimilar in others, to the more celebrated Pampas of the regions to the south.  The wonderful plain, covering more than two hundred thousand square miles, and forming the basin of the gigantic Orinoco, is a study in itself.  The stranger who descends upon the vast savanna from the mountains that line and defend the coast is impressed with the momentary belief, when his eye for the first time sweeps over the level immensity, that he is again approaching the sea.  From the hilly country through which he has toiled, he beholds at his feet a limitless and dusky plain, smooth as an ocean in repose, but undulating, like it, in gigantic sweeps and curves.  The Llanos that he sees spread out before him thus are one huge and exuberant pasture.  Like the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, they are the support of myriads of roaming cattle; but, unlike them, they are intersected by numerous rivers, and suffer rather from excess than from lack of moisture.  The Orinoco sweeps, in turbid magnificence, from west to east, traversing their entire breadth; and its countless tributaries seam in every direction the immense plain thus divided, and frequently by their unmanageable floods turn it for thousands of miles into a lake.

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