cast, constantly becoming more gloomy, imperious, and wild. From the age of fifteen years he was irresistibly controlled by the passion for_garoblmg, as is often the case with such natures, which need strong excitement to awaken their dormant energies. This made him notorious in the city, and intolerable in the house which afforded him its hospitality; and finally under this influence, by a shot fired atone George Peña, he shed the first rill of blood which went to make up tile wide torrent that marked his way through life.
On his becoming an adult, the thread of his life disappears in an intricate labyrinth of bouts and broils among the people of the surrounding region. Sometimes lying hid, always pursued, he passed his time in gambling, working as a common laborer, domineering over everybody around him, and distributing his stabs among them.
On the Godoy farm in San Juan are shown to this day mud-walls of Quiroga's treading; there are others in Fiambola, in La Rioja, made by him. He himself pointed out others in Mendoza, in the very place where one afternoon he had twenty-six of the officers who surrendered at Chacon dragged from their houses and shot to avenge Villafañe. He also showed some monuments of his wandering life of labor in the country districts of Buenos Ayes. What motives induced this man, brought up in a respectable family, son of a man of means and creditable life, to descend to a hireling's position, and moreover to select the dullest and most brutish kind of work, needing only bodily strength and endurance? Was it because the labor of building these mud-walls is recompensed with double
