Standing Waist- High In The Water, They Wash Out The Stains With Black Soap Of Their Own Manufacture, Beating Each Article With Hardwood Boards Made Somewhat Like A Cricketer's Bat.

The cloths are then laid on the sand or stones of the shore.

The women gossip and smoke until these are dry and ready to carry home again ere the heat becomes too intense.

In a description of Argentine village life, I could not possibly omit the priest, the "all in all" to the native, the temporal and spiritual king, who bears in his hands the destinies of the living and the dead. These men are the potentates of the people, who refer everything to them, from the most trivial matter to the weightier one of the saving of their souls after death. Bigotry and superstition are extreme.

Renous, the naturalist, tells us that he visited one of these towns and left some caterpillars with a girl. These she was to feed until his return, that they might change to butterflies. When this was rumored through the village, priest and governor consulted together and agreed that it must be black heresy. When poor Renous returned some time afterwards he was arrested.

The Argentine village priest is a dangerous enemy to the Protestant. Many is the time he has insulted me to my face, or, more cowardly, charged the school-boys to pelt and annoy me. In the larger towns the priest has defamed me through the press, and when I have answered him also by that means, he has heaped insult upon injury, excluded me from society, and made me a pariah and a byword to the superstitious people. I have been stoned and spat upon, hurled to the ground, had half-wild dogs set on me, and my horse frightened that he might throw me. I have been refused police help, or been called to the office to give an account of myself, all because I was a Protestant, or infidel, as they prefer to term it. At those times great patience was needed, for at the least sign of resistance on my part I should have been attacked by the whole village in one mass. The policeman on the street has looked expectantly on, eager to see me do this, and on one occasion he escorted me to the station for snatching a bottle from the hand of a boy who was in the act of throwing it at my head. Arriving there I was most severely reprimanded, although, fortunately, not imprisoned.

Women have crossed themselves and run from me in terror to seek the holy water bottle blessed by the father. Doors have been shut in my face, and angry voices bade me begone, at the instigation of this black-robed believer in the Virgin. Congregations of worshippers in the dark-aisled church have listened to a fabulous description of my mission and character, until the barber would not cut my hair or the butcher sell me his meat!

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