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For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me. Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table: not like them have I got the knack of investigating, as the knack of nut-cracking. Freedom do I love, and the air over fresh soil; rather would I sleep on ox-skins than on their honours and dignities.

Fires were lit, and after a fourteen hours' fast we feasted royally on beans and rice and pork and beef, seated around ox-skins spread upon the ground. The sky cleared; the stars blazed down through the cool night; and wrapped in our blankets we slept soundly, warm and comfortable. Next morning the trail had turned, and our course led northward and at times east of north.

In the villages of the Rio Magdalena the Indians often invited us to stretch ourselves as they did on ox-skins, near the church, in the middle of the plaza grande, where they had assembled all the cows in the neighbourhood. The proximity of cattle gives some repose to man. Thus they call little chambers, without doors or windows, into which they creep horizontally through a very low opening.

"Go on, you are a snail!" snapped the Canoness. "Only then was it discovered that his father had amassed a fortune in ox-skins, that the son had picked up some manners, riding, fencing, and blazonry; none knows how; and that his first introductions were bought and paid for. He is now, some say, in the Bastille, some in Vincennes Dungeon, nobody will ever know exactly which. That is all, ladies."

The Agua miel is collected in ox-skins, placed like troughs on four stakes, where the liquor ferments; in about seventy-two hours it is ready for delivery to those that use it, among whom must be placed many Europeans. A maguey plant is serviceable in producing sap for two or three months.