Some of the
handkerchiefs they make are worth $50 each in the fashionable cities
of America and Europe. A month's work may easily be expended on such
a dainty fabric.
The women seem exceptionally fond of pets. Monkeys and birds are
common in a house, and the housewife will show you her parrot and
say, "In this bird dwells the spirit of my departed mother." An
enemy, somehow, has always turned into an alligator - a reptile much
loathed by them.
In even the poorest houses there is a shrine and a "Saint." These
deities can answer all prayers if they choose to. Sometimes, however,
they are not "in the humor," and at one house the saint had refused,
so he was laid flat on the floor, face downwards. The woman swore
that until he answered her petition she would not lift him up again.
He laid thus all night; whether longer or not I do not know.
Having heard much concerning the moralite of the people, I asked
the maid at a respectable private house where I was staying: "Have
you a father?" "No, sir," she answered, "we Paraguayans are not
accustomed to have a father." Children of five or six, when asked
about that parent, will often answer, "Father died in the war." The
war ended thirty-nine years ago, but they have been taught to say
this by the mother.
As in Argentina the first word the stranger learns is manana (to-
morrow), so here the first is dy-qui (I don't know). Whatever
question you ask the Guarani, he will almost invariably answer, "Dy-
qui." Ask him his age, he answers "Dy-qui" To your question: "Are
you twenty or one hundred and twenty?" he will reply "Dy-qui."
Through the long rule of the Jesuits the natives stopped thinking;
they had it all done for them. "At the same time that they enslaved
them, they tortured them into the profession of the religion they had
imported; and as they had seen that in the old land the love of this
world and the deceitfulness of riches were ever in the way of
conversion to the true faith, they piously relieved the Indians of
these snares of the soul, even going so far in the discharge of this
painful duty as to relieve them of life at the same time, if
necessary to get their possessions into their own hands," [Footnote:
Robertson's "Letters on Paraguay."]
"The stories of their hardness, and perfidy, and immorality beggar
description. The children of the priests have become so numerous that
the shame is no longer considered." [Footnote: Service.]
As the Mahometans have their Mecca, so the Paraguayans have Caacupe;
and the image of the Virgin in that village is the great wonder-
worker.
