It Is Not An Uncommon Sight To See A Black-Robed Priest With His Hand
On A Boy's Head Giving Him A Benediction That He May Be Enabled To
Sell His Newspapers Or Lottery Tickets With More Celerity.
The National Lottery is a great institution, and hundreds keep
themselves poor buying tickets.
In one year the lottery has realized
the sum of $3,409,143.57. The Government takes forty per cent. of
this, and divides the rest between a number of charitable and
religious organizations, all, needless to say, being Roman Catholic.
Amongst the names appear the following: Poor Sisters of St. Joseph,
Workshop of Our Lady, Sisters of St. Anthony, etc.
Little booths for the sale of lottery tickets are erected in the
vestibules of some of the churches, and the Government, in this way,
repays the church.
The gambling passion is one of Argentina's greatest curses. Tickets
are bought by all, from the Senator down to the newsboy who ventures
his only dollar.
You meet the water-seller passing down the street with his barrel
cart, drawn by three or four horses with tinkling bells, dispensing
water to customers at five cents a pail. The poorer classes have no
other means of procuring this precious liquid. The water is kept in a
corner of the house in large sun-baked jars. A peculiarity of these
pots is that they are not made to stand alone, but have to be held up
by something.
At early morning and evening the milkman goes his rounds on
horseback. The milk he carries in six long, narrow cans, like
inverted sugar-loaves, three on each side of his raw-hide saddle, he
himself being perched between them on a sheepskin. In some cans he
carries pure cream, which the jolting of his horse soon converts into
butter. This he lifts out with his hands to any who care to buy.
After the addition of a little salt, and the subtraction of a little
buttermilk, this manteca is excellent. After serving you he will
again mount his horse, but not until his hands have been well wiped
on its tail, which almost touches the ground. The other cans of the
lechero contain a mixture known to him alone. I never analyzed it,
but have remarked a chalky substance in the bottom of my glass. He
does not profess to sell pure milk; that you can buy, but, of course,
at a higher price, from the pure milk seller. In the cool of the
afternoon he will bring round his cows, with bells on their necks and
calves dragging behind. The calves are tied to the mothers' tails,
and wear a muzzle. At a sh-h from the sidewalk he stops them, and,
stooping down, fills your pitcher according to your money. The cows,
through being born and bred to a life in the streets, are generally
miserable-looking beasts. Strange to add, the one milkman shoes his
cows and the other leaves his horse unshod. It is not customary in
this country for man's noble friend to wear more than his own natural
hoof. A visit to the blacksmith is entertaining. The smith, by means
of a short lasso, deftly trips up the animal, and, with its legs
securely lashed, the cow must lie on its back while he shoes its
upturned hoofs.
Many and varied are the scenes. One is struck by the number of
horses, seven and eight often being yoked to one cart, which even
then they sometimes find difficult to draw. Some of the streets are
very bad, worse than our country lanes, and filled with deep ruts and
drains, into which the horses often fall. There the driver will
sometimes cruelly leave them, when, after his arm aches in using the
whip, he finds the animal cannot rise. For the veriest trifle I have
known men to smash the poor dumb brute's eyes out with the stock of
the whip, and I have been very near the Police Station more than once
when my righteous blood compelled me to interfere. Where, oh, where
is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals? Surely no
suffering creatures under the sun cry out louder for mercy than those
in Argentina?
As I have said, horses are left to die in the public streets. It has
been my painful duty to pass moaning creatures lying helplessly in
the road, with broken limbs, under a burning sun, suffering hunger
and thirst, for three consecutive days, before kind death, the
sufferer's friend, released them. Looking on such sights, seeing
every street urchin with coarse laugh and brutal jest jump on such an
animal's quivering body, stuff its parched mouth with mud, or poke
sticks into its staring eyes, I have cried aloud at the injustice.
The policeman and the passers-by have only laughed at me for my
pains.
In my experiences in South America I found cruelty to be a marked
feature of the people. If the father thrusts his dagger into his
enemy, and the mother, in her fits of rage, sticks her hairpin into
her maid's body, can it be wondered at if the children inherit cruel
natures? How often have I seen a poor horse fall between the shafts
of some loaded cart of bricks or sand! Never once have I seen his
harness undone and willing hands help him up, as in other civilized
lands. No, the lashing of the cruel whip or the knife's point is his
only help. If, as some religious writers have said, the horse will be
a sharer of Paradise along with man, his master, then those from
Buenos Ayres will feed in stalls of silver and have their wounds
healed by the clover of eternal kindness. "God is Love."
I have said the streets are full of holes. In justice to the
authorities I must mention the fact that sometimes, especially at the
crossings, these are filled up. To carry truthfulness still further,
however, I must state that more than once I have known them bridged
over with the putrefying remains of a horse in the last stages of
decomposition.
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