already glanced at the people of La Rioja,--at their dreamy, Oriental
character, at their pastoral pursuits. A community of herdsmen, scattered
over an extensive territory, and deprived at one blow of the two great
families to whom they had been accustomed to look up, with infantine
submission, as their God-appointed chiefs,--these were not the men to
stand up, unprompted by a single master-mind, to rid themselves of one
whose oppression was, after all, only a new form of the treatment to
which, for an entire generation, they had been subjected. La Rioja and San
Juan were the only two provinces in which Quiroga's heavy hand was felt
continuously; in the others he ruled rather by influence than in person;
and the Gauchos, as a matter of course, were enthusiastic for a man who
exalted the peasant at the expense of the citizen, whose exactions were
actually burdensome only to the wealthy, and who permitted every license
to his followers, with the single exception of disobedience to himself.

He was not without--it is impossible that he should have lacked--some of
those instinctive and personal attributes with which almost every savage
chieftain who has maintained so extraordinary an ascendency over his
fellows has been endowed. Sarmiento tells us that he was tall, immensely
powerful, a famous _ginete_ or horseman, a more adroit wielder of the
lasso and the _bolas_ than even his rival, Rosas, capable of great
endurance, and abstinent from intoxicating drinks.

His eye and voice were dreaded more by his soldiers than the lances of
their antagonists. He could wring a Gaucho's secret from his breast; it
was useless to attempt a subterfuge before him. Some article, we are told,
was once stolen from a company of his troops, and every effort for its
recovery proved fruitless. It was reported to Quiroga. He paraded the men,
and, having procured a number of sticks, exactly equal in length, gave to
each man one, proclaiming that the soldier whose stick should be found