The carts used by the peasants are almost as archaic as the ploughs; their shape is that of a small boat, and their walnut wheels make a strange screaming sound as they turn on their walnut axles, which can be heard at a considerable distance. There is a special word to denote this sound in the Gallegan language (_v. chirriar_; _n. chirrio_). I examined the axles of several, and found them twice the thickness of a man’s wrist and as smooth as satin. This “singing” of the cartwheels is not allowed in the towns, so the peasants soap the axles when they come into the streets; but the louder their carts sing in the fields and on the country roads the better pleased are they, for they believe that the oxen like the sound and will not work well without it. They also find it convenient in narrow lanes where there is not room for two carts to pass each other, because it warns them in good time that they are approaching each other, and that one must halt or turn back. They say, too, that in olden days, when the mountains abounded in wolves and bears, the singing cartwheels frightened and kept them from attacking the oxen and their drivers. Not only the peasants, but everybody likes to hear the cartwheels in the quiet summer evenings; it is like the sound of the scythe in England, and its associations are much the same. Rosalia Castro speaks of it as one of the things she missed when she went to live in Castille:
“Chirrar d’ os carros d’ a Ponte, Tristes campanas d’ Herbon, Cando vos ozo partidesme As cordas d’ a corazon.”
The long horns of the oxen often carried my thoughts to the Highlands of Scotland. The horns of a couple of them as they stood yoked to a cart in one of the narrow streets of Santiago would span the entire thoroughfare, but they never frightened even the smallest child, and their large, gentle eyes more than counteracted the ferocious appearance of their horns. They are very strong, and draw loads that would break the back of many an English cart-horse. In Coruña I saw them drawing a couple of huge iron pipes many yards in length. Seoane,[219] writing on the bulls of Galicia, says that these animals were found wild in Central Europe up to the sixteenth century, and that the Spaniards imported them into South America, and thus brought into existence the immense herds now to be found between the Andes and the Atlantic coast, and called _toros cimarrones_.