GENERAL. 13 



one rides ; all work is done on horseback, and only with 

 the stimulant of the movement of the horse is energy 

 awakened. 



The ' campo' a plain has its own peculiar beauties 

 and aspects, varying with the season. The unbroken carpet 

 of short green herbage of the winter is changed to vast 

 sheets of colour in the spring. Luxuriant grasses, tangled 

 clover (spotted medick), with its broad leaf of rich green 

 and black spot, intermixed over vast tracks with the young 

 variegated-leaved thistle, remarkable by its large green 

 and white foliage ; a little later on, the wild flowers min- 

 gle with the tall grasses rye-grass and many spreading 

 panacled grasses or overtop them, forming' immense 

 sheets of colour. Acres -upon acres of the brilliant scarlet 

 vervain, gorgeous in the light, or purple or white verbena. 

 Leagues of a rich purple flower, the ' flor morada' (a 

 plantain), changing to bright rosa as the setting sun casts 

 its warm oblique light upon it. The tall ' biznaga,' with 

 its head of clustered white florets ; the branching many- 

 flowered camomile, and numberless others, white, pink, 

 yellow, &c. 



From these broad lines or sheets of colour, we enter on 

 the great thistle camps. There are two varieties of thistle, 

 the one annual, tall, variegated, broad leaved, known in 

 the garden in England, and growing in this country to the 

 height of eight or ten feet, in dense array, impenetrable 

 except in the cattle track. These beds of thistle extend 

 leagues and leagues, and at the time of flowering, as far 

 as the eye can reach, they present an almost unbroken 

 sheet of rose purple flowers ; and in some districts, a day's 

 ride along a road or track, on either side of which stretches 

 this forest of thistles, leaves the traveller still with the 

 same stretching to the horizon. Thousands of cattle 

 browse unseen amongst the thistles, working tracks through 



