Mi muger y mi caballo
Se me murieron á un tiempo;
Que muger, ni que demonio,
Mi caballo es lo que siento.
My wife and my valued horse
Died both at the same time;
To the devil with my wife,
For my horse do I repine.
Few people in the world are better riders than the Llaneros of Venezuela, if we except perhaps the Gauchos of Buenos Ayres, or equal to either in the dexterity they display in the wonderful feats of horsemanship to which their occupations in the field inure them from childhood. Their horses, moreover, are so well trained to the various evolutions of their profession, that animal and rider seem to possess but one existence.
The life of the Llanero, like that of the Gaucho his prototype, is singularly interesting, and resembles in many respects that of others who, like them, have their abode in the midst of extensive plains. Thus they have been aptly styled the Cossacks and the Arabs of the New World, with both of whom they have many points in common, but more especially do they resemble the last named. When visiting the famous Constantine Gallery of paintings at Versailles, I was struck with the resemblance of the Algerine heroes of Horace Vernet with our own, revealing at once the Moorish descent of the latter, independently of other characteristic peculiarities.
The inimitable author of “Journeys Across The Pampas,” already quoted, alluding to the life of these wild shepherds of the plains, compares it very appropriately to the rise and progress of a young eagle, so beautifully described by Horace in the following verses:
Olim juventas et patrius vigor
Nidum laborum propulit inscium;
Vernique, jam nimbis remotis,
Insolitos docuere nisus
Venti paventem; mox in ovilia
Demisit hostem vividus impetus;
Nunc in reluctantes dracones
Egit amor dapis atque pugnæ.
—Horace, Book iv., Ode iv.
“Whom native vigor, and the rush
Of youth have spurr’d to quit the nest,
And skies of blue, in springtide’s flush,
Entice aloft to breast
The gales he fear’d before his lordly plumes were drest.
“Now swooping, eager for his prey,
Spreads havoc through the flutter’d fold;
Straight, fired by love of food and fray,
In grapple fierce and bold,
The struggling dragons rends, e’en in their rocky hold.”