ANGOSTURA DE PAINE. 



243 



and cheese are exceedingly good. The sheep are very fine ; their 

 fleeces are good, and the wool is of a very long staple, and each 

 fleece fetches at least three reals. The shearing time is October. 

 I also saw a sheep from the Pehuenches with five horns, no two of 

 which seemed to form a pair. Hanging up before the door, there 

 was a young stuffed jaguar, commonly called the Chile lion, an inha- 

 bitant of the hills here, and very destructive among the sheep and 

 the young cattle ; but I believe it never meddles with man. Don 

 Justo gave me the paw of a large one, which measures six inches 

 across, and must have belonged to a very formidable brute. The 

 cellars are fitted up with earthen jars sunk into the ground, in the 

 same manner as the Jesuits tell us the Indians of the interior prac- 

 tised with their chicha jars. Into the smooth clay floor the jars are 

 sunk nearly to the middle. Each cellar contained about sixty jars, 

 every one holding twenty-five arobas : they are made of clay from 

 the neighbouring hills, and four reals for each aroba they contain 

 is the price. When the must is to be converted into wine, one aroba 

 of boiling grape-juice is poured into every four arobas of must, to 

 hasten the fermentation ; the delicacy of making wine consisting in 

 never allowing the juice actually to boil, but to stop it just on the 

 point, lest it should communicate an empyreumatic taste to the wine. 

 The jars are luted up for a season to ripen the liquor; which, 

 when ready, is put into skins, for the merchant. I tasted several 

 sorts of wine and must to-day, most of them very good; and the 

 brandies exceedingly pleasant, though the stills are rudely con- 

 structed. In the fields here wheat yields an hundred-fold ; barley 

 seventy-fold. The ground is used one year for corn, and two for 

 grazing ; lucern being the artificial grass sown. However, some 

 natural kinds of fodder grow spontaneously after the corn. The 

 most pleasant to the cattle, of these, is the alfilerilla, so called from 

 the shape of its seed : it is the musk geraneum, indigenous in Eng- 

 land, as well as here ; and is said to communicate a pleasant flavour 

 to the flesh of the animals who feed on it at certain seasons. Ano- 

 ther favourite plant of the cattle is the cardoon, or large eatable 



ii 2 



