_Vizcachas_ Swarmed In All That District Where
They Have Now Practically Been Exterminated, And Lived In Villages,
Called _Vizcacheras,_ Composed Of Thirty Or Forty Huge Burrows - About
The Size Of Half A Dozen Badgers' Earths Grouped Together.
The earth
thrown out of these diggings formed a mound, and being bare of
vegetation it appeared in the landscape as a clay-coloured spot on the
green surface.
Sitting on a horse one could count a score to fifty or
sixty of these mounds or _vizcacheras_ on the surrounding plain.
On all this visible earth there were no fences, and no trees excepting
those which had been planted at the old estancia houses, and these
being far apart the groves and plantations looked like small islands
of trees, or mounds, blue in the distance, on the great plain or
pampa. They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy
poplar, which of all trees is the easiest one to grow in that land.
And these trees at the estancias or cattle-ranches were, at the time I
am writing about, almost invariably aged and in many instances in an
advanced state of decay. It is interesting to know how these old
groves and plantations ever came into existence in a land where at
that time there was practically no tree-planting.
The first colonists who made their homes in this vast vacant space,
called the pampas, came from a land where the people are accustomed to
sit in the shade of trees, where corn and wine and oil are supposed to
be necessaries, and where there is salad in the garden.
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