Right along the frontier between Uruguay and Rio Grande, the southern province of Brazil, the Spanish and the Portuguese sit face to face, as they have sat for ages, looking at, but never understanding, one another, both in the Old and the New World.

In Tuy and Valenza, Monzon and Salvatierra, at Poncho Verde and Don Pedrito, Rivera and Santa Ana do Libramento, and far away above Cruz Alta, where the two clumps of wood that mark old camps of the two people are called O Matto Castelhano and O Matto Portuguez, the rivalry of centuries is either actual or at least commemorated on the map.

The border-line that once made different peoples of the dwellers at Floriston and Gretna, still prevails in the little castellated towns, which snarl at one another across the Minho, just as they did of old.

“Those people in Valenza would steal the sacrament,” says the street urchin playing on the steps of the half fortalice, half church that is the cathedral of Tuy on the Spanish side.

His fellow in Valenza spits towards Tuy and remarks, “From Spain come neither good marriages nor the wholesome winds.”

So on to Salvatierra and Monzon, or any other of the villages or towns upon the river, and in the current of the native speech there still remains some saying of the kind, with its sharp edges still unworn after six centuries of use. Great is the power of artificial barriers to restrain mankind. No proverb ever penned is more profound than that which sets out, “Fear guards the vineyard, not the fence around it.”

So Portuguese and Spaniards in their peninsula have fought and hated and fought and ridiculed each other after the fashion of children that have quarrelled over a broken toy. Blood and an almost common speech, for both speak one Romance when all is said, have both been impotent against the custom-house, the flag, the foolish dynasty, for few countries in the world have had more foolish kings than Spain and Portugal.

That this should be so in the Old World is natural enough, for the dead hand still rules, and custom and tradition have more strength than race and creed; but that the hatred should have been transplanted to America, and still continue, is a proof that folly never dies.

In the old towns on either side of the Minho the exterior life of the two peoples is the same.

In the stone-built, arcaded plazas women still gather round the fountain and fill their iron-hooped water-barrels through long tin pipes, shaped like the tin valences used in wine-stores. Donkeys stand at the doors, carrying charcoal in esparto baskets, whether in Portugal or Spain, and goats parade the streets driven by goatherds, wearing shapeless, thickly-napped felt hats and leather overalls.

The water-carrier in both countries calls out “agua-a-a,” making it sound like Arabic, and long trains of mules bring brushwood for the baker’s furnace (even as in Morocco), or great nets of close-chopped straw for horses’ fodder.

At eventide the girls walk on the plaza, their mothers, aunts, or servants following them as closely as their shadows on a sunny afternoon. In quiet streets lovers on both sides of the river talk from a first-floor balcony to the street, or whisper through the window-bars on the ground floor. The little shops under the low arches of the arcaded streets have yellow flannel drawers for men and petticoats of many colours hanging close outside their doors, on whose steps sleep yellow dogs.

The jangling bells in the decaying lichen-grown old towers of the churches jangle and clang in the same key, and as appears without a touch of odium theologicum. The full bass voices boom from the choirs, in which the self-same organs in their walnut cases have the same rows of golden trumpets sticking out into the aisle.

One faith, one speech, one mode of daily life, the same sharp “green” wine, the same bread made of maize and rye, and the same heaps of red tomatoes and green peppers glistening in the sun in the same market-places, and yet a rivalry and a difference as far apart as east from west still separates them.

In both their countries the axles of the bullock-carts, with solid wheels and wattled hurdle sides, like those upon a Roman coin, still creak and whine to keep away the wolves.

In the soft landscape the maize fields wave in the rich hollows on both sides of the Minho.

The pine woods mantle the rocky hills that overhang the deep-sea lochs that burrow in both countries deep into the entrails of the land.

The women, with their many-coloured petticoats and handkerchiefs, chaffer at the same fairs to which their husbands ride their ponies in their straw cloaks.

At “romerias” the peasantry dance to the bagpipe and the drum the self-same dances, and both climb the self-same steep grey steps through the dark lanes, all overhung with gorse and broom, up to the Calvaries, where the three crosses take on the self-same growth of lichen and of moss. Yet the “boyero” who walks before the placid oxen, with their cream-coloured flanks and liquid eyes of onyx, feels he is different, right down to the last molecule of his being, from the man upon the other side.

So was it once, and perhaps is to-day, with those who dwell in Liddes or Bewcastle dales. Spaniard and Portuguese, as Scot and Englishman in older times, can never see one matter from the same point of view. The Portuguese will say that the Castilian is a rogue, and the Castilian returns the compliment. Neither have any reason to support their view, for who wants reason to support that which he feels is true.

It may be that the Spaniard is a little rougher and the Portuguese more cunning; but if it is the case or not, the antipathy remains, and has been taken to America.

From the Laguna de Merin to the Cuareim, that is to say, along a frontier of two hundred leagues, the self-same feeling rules upon both sides of the line. There, as in Portugal and Spain, although the country, whether in Uruguay or in Brazil, is little different, yet it has suffered something indefinable by being occupied by members of the two races so near and yet so different from one another.

Great rolling seas of waving grass, broken by a few stony hills, are the chief features of the landscape of the frontiers in both republics. Estancia houses, dazzlingly white, buried in peach and fig groves, dot the plains, looking like islands in the sea of grass. Great herds of cattle roam about, and men on horseback, galloping like clockwork, sail across the plains like ships upon a sea. Along the river-banks grow strips of thorny trees, and as the frontier line trends northward palm-trees appear, and monkeys chatter in the woods. Herds of wild asses, shyer than antelopes, gaze at the passing horsemen, scour off when he approaches, and are lost into the haze. Stretches of purple borage, known as La Flor Morada, carpet the ground in spring and early summer, giving place later on to red verbena; and on the edges of the streams the tufts of the tall Pampa grass recall the feathers on a Pampa Indian’s spear.

Bands of grave ostriches feed quietly upon the tops of hills, and stride away when frightened, down the wind, with wings stretched out to catch the breeze.

Clothes are identical, or almost so; the poncho and the loose trousers stuffed into high patent-leather boots, the hat kept in its place by a black ribbon with two tassels, are to be seen on both sides of the frontier. Only in Brazil a sword stuck through the girth replaces the long knife of Uruguay. Perhaps in that one item all the differences between the races manifests itself, for the sword is, as it were, a symbol, for no one ever saw one drawn or used in any way but as an ornament. It is, in fact, but a survival of old customs, which are cherished both by the Portuguese and the Brazilians as the apple of the eye.

The vast extent of the territory of Brazil, its inaccessibility, and the enormous distances to be travelled from the interior to the coast, and the sense of remoteness from the outer world, have kept alive a type of man not to be found in any other country where the Christian faith prevails. Risings of fanatics still are frequent; one is going on to-day in ParanÁ, and that of the celebrated Antonio Concelheiro, twenty years ago, shook the whole country to its core. Slavery existed in the memory of people still alive. Women in the remoter towns are still secluded almost as with the Moors. The men still retain something of the Middle Ages in their love of show. All in the province of Rio Grande are great horsemen, and all use silver trappings on a black horse, and all have horses bitted so as to turn round in the air, just as a hawk turns on the wing.

The sons of men who have been slaves abound in all the little frontier towns, and old grey-headed negroes, who have been slaves themselves, still hang about the great estates. Upon the other side, in Uruguay, the negro question was solved once and for all in the Independence Wars, for then the negroes were all formed into battalions by themselves and set in the forefront of the battle, to die for liberty in a country where they all were slaves the month before. War turned them into heroes, and sent them out to die.

When once their independence was assured, the Uruguayans fell into line like magic with the modern trend of thought. Liberty to them meant absolute equality, for throughout the land no snob is found to leave a slug’s trail on the face of man by his subserviency.

Women were held free, that is, as free as it is possible for them to be in any Latin-peopled land. Across the line, even to-day, a man may stay a week in a Brazilian country house and never see a woman but a mulata girl or an old negro crone. Still he feels he is watched by eyes he never sees, listens to voices singing or laughing, and a sense of mystery prevails.

Spaniards and Portuguese in the New World have blended just as little as they have done at home. Upon the frontier all the wilder spirits of Brazil and Uruguay have congregated. There they pursue the life, but little altered, that their fathers led full fifty years ago. All carry arms, and use them on small provocation, for if an accident takes place the frontier shields the slayer, for to pursue him usually entails a national quarrel, and so the game goes on.

So Jango Chaves, feeling inclined for sport, or, as he might have said, to “brincar un bocadinho,” saddled up his horse. He mounted, and, as his friends were looking on, ran it across the plaza of the town, and, turning like a seagull in its flight, came back to where his friends were standing, and stopped it with a jerk.

His silver harness jingled, and his heavy spurs, hanging loosely on his high-heeled boots, clanked like fetters, as his active little horse bounded into the air and threw the sand up in a shower.

The rider, sitting him like a statue, with the far-off look horsemen of every land assume when riding a good horse and when they know they are observed, slackened his hand and let him fall into a little measured trot, arching his neck and playing with the bit, under which hung a silver eagle on a hinge. Waving his hand towards his friends, Jango rode slowly through the town. He passed through sandy streets of flat-roofed, whitewashed houses, before whose doors stood hobbled horses nodding in the sun.

He rode past orange gardens, surrounded by brown walls of sun-baked bricks with the straw sticking in them, just as it had dried. In the waste the castor-oil bushes formed little jungles, out of which peered cats, exactly as a tiger peers out of a real jungle in the woods.

The sun poured down, and was reverberated back from the white houses, and on the great gaunt building, where the captain-general lived, floated the green-and-yellow flag of the republic, looking like a bandana handkerchief. He passed the negro rancheria, without which no such town as Santa Anna do Libramento is complete, and might have marked, had he not been too much used to see them, the naked negro children playing in the sand. Possibly, if he marked them, he referred to them as “cachorrinhos pretos,” for the old leaven of the days of slavery is strongly rooted in Brazil. So he rode on, a slight and graceful figure, bending to each movement of his horse, his mobile, olive-coloured features looking like a bronze masque in the fierce downpour of the sun.

As he rode on, his whip, held by a thong and dangling from his fingers, swung against his horse’s flanks, keeping time rhythmically to its pace. He crossed the rivulet that flows between the towns and came out on the little open plain that separates them. From habit, or because he felt himself amongst unfriendly or uncomprehended people, he touched his knife and his revolvers, hidden beneath his summer poncho, with his right hand, and with his bridle arm held high, ready for all eventualities, passed into just such another sandy street as he had left behind.

Save that all looked a little newer, and that the stores were better supplied with goods, and that there were no negro huts, the difference was slight between the towns. True that the green-and-yellow flag had given place to the barred blue-and-white of Uruguay. An armed policeman stood at the corners of the main thoroughfares, and water-carts went up and down at intervals. The garden in the plaza had a well-tended flower-garden.

A band was playing in the middle of it, and Jango could not fail to notice that Rivera was more prosperous than was his native town.

Whether that influenced him, or whether it was the glass of caÑa which he had at the first pulperia, is a moot point, or whether the old antipathy between the races brought by his ancestors from the peninsula; anyhow, he left his horse untied, and with the reins thrown down before it as he got off to have his drink. When he came out, a policeman called to him to hobble it or tie it up.

Without a word he gathered up his reins, sprang at a bound upon his horse, and, drawing his mother-of-pearl-handled pistol, fired at the policeman almost as he sprang. The shot threw up a shower of sand just in the policeman’s face, and probably saved Jango’s life. Drawing his pistol, the man fired back, but Jango, with a shout and pressure of his heels, was off like lightning, firing as he rode, and zig-zagging across the street. The policeman’s shot went wide, and Jango, turning in the saddle, fired again and missed.

By this time men with pistols in their hands stood at the doors of all the houses; but the Brazilian passed so rapidly, throwing himself alternately now on the near side, now on the off side of his horse, hanging by one foot across the croup and holding with the other to the mane, that he presented no mark for them to hit.

As he passed by the “jefatura” where the alcalde and his friends were sitting smoking just before the door, he fired with such good aim that a large piece of plaster just above their heads fell, covering them with dust.

Drawing his second pistol and still firing as he went, he dashed out of the town, in spite of shots from every side, his horse bounding like lightning as his great silver spurs ploughed deep into its sides. When he had crossed the little bit of neutral ground, and just as a patrol of cavalry appeared, ready to gallop after him, a band of men from his own town came out to meet him.

He stopped, and shouting out defiance to the Uruguayans, drew up his horse, and lit a cigarette. Then, safe beyond the frontier, trotted on gently to meet his friends, his horse shaking white foam from off its bit, and little rivulets of blood dripping down from its sides into the sand.