56 UP THE PARAGUAY [chap, ii 



to overlook the vital importance of the ethical and 

 spiritual, the truly religious, element in Hfe ; and in 

 practice the average good man grows clearly to under- 

 stand this, and to express the need in concrete form by 

 saying that no community can make much headway if 

 it does not contain both a church and a school. 

 / ''We took breakfast — the eleven o'clock Brazilian 

 / breakfast — on Colonel Rondon's boat. Caymans were 

 becoming more plentiful. The ugly brutes lay on the 

 sand-flats and mud- banks hke logs, always with the 

 head raised, sometimes with the jaws open. They are 

 often dangerous to domestic animals, and are always 

 destructive to fish, and it is good to shoot them. I 

 killed half a dozen, and missed nearly as many more— a 

 throbbing boat does not improve one's aim. We passed 

 forests of palms that extended for leagues, and vast 

 marshy meadows, where storks, herons, and ibis were 

 gathered, with flocks of cormorants and darters on the 

 sand-bars, and stilts, skimmers, and clouds of beautiful 

 swaying terns in the foreground. About noon we 

 passed the highest point which the old Spanish con- 

 quistadores and explorers, Irala and Ayolas, had reached 

 in the course of their marvellous journeys in the first 

 half of the sixteenth century — at a time when there 

 was not a settlement in what is now the United States, 

 and when hardly a single English sea-captain had 

 ventured so much as to cross the Atlantic. 



By the following day the country on the east bank 

 had become a vast marshy plain, dotted here and there 

 by tree-clad patches of higher land. The morning was 

 rainy — a contrast to the fine weather we had hitherto 

 encountered. We passed wood-yards and cattle-ranches. 

 At one of the latter the owner, an Argentine of Irish 

 parentage, who still spoke English with the accent of 



