Transcriber's Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

WORKING NORTH

FROM PATAGONIA

Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana

WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA
BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY, EARNED ON THE WAY, THROUGH SOUTHERN AND EASTERN SOUTH AMERICA

BY

HARRY A. FRANCK

Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Zone Policeman 88,” “Roaming Through the West Indies,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” etc., etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH 176 UNUSUAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, WITH A MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1921

Copyright, 1921, by

The Century Co.

Printed in U. S. A.

FOREWORD

Though it stands by itself as a single entity, the present volume is a continuation and the conclusion of a four-year journey through Latin-America, and a companion-piece to my “Vagabonding Down the Andes.” The entrance of the United States into the World War made it impossible until the present time to continue that narrative from the point where the story above mentioned left it; but though several years have elapsed since the journey herein chronicled was made, the conditions encountered are, with minor exceptions, those which still prevail. South American society moves with far more inertia than our own, and while the war brought a certain new prosperity to parts of that continent and a tendency to become, by force of necessity, somewhat more self-supporting in industry and less dependent upon the outside world for most manufactured necessities, the countries herein visited remain for the most part what they were when the journey was made.

Readers of books of travel have been known to question the wisdom of including foreign words in the text. A certain number of these, however, are almost indispensable; without them not only would there be a considerable loss in atmosphere, but often only laborious circumlocutions could take their place. Every foreign word in this volume has been included for one of three reasons, because there is no English equivalent; because the nearest English word would be at best a poor translation; or because the foreign word is of intrinsic interest, for its origin, its musical cadence, picturesqueness, conciseness, or for some similar cause. In every case its meaning has been given at least the first time it is introduced; the pronunciation requires little more than giving the Latin value to vowels and enunciating every letter; and the slight trouble of articulating such terms correctly instead of slurring over them cannot but add to the rhythm, as well as to the understanding, of those sentences in which they occur.

Harry A. Franck.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA

CHAPTER I
THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS

In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protégé called the “pale of respectability,” and my duties as “outside man” brought me into daily contact with all classes of Porteños, as natives of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in their own habitat.

Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago, and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a true one.

A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name of calles. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses; wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly provincial, conservative and fanatical.

Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore, that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción.

The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity. The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, according to the mood or the haste of the victim.

The Porteño has made various bold attacks upon this problem of congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate Casa Rosada, or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic which refuses to risk itself in the constricted calles of the downtown labyrinth.

Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires. There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander for hours without crossing the same ground twice.

Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level. Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its general aspect.

On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other great city; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the Porteño and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is he accustomed to refer to his city as the “Paris of South America”—all South American capitals are that to their own people—but he copies more or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good argentinos. The artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps. City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to the city’s beauty is awarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for a decade from the burden of taxes.

It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of flat country, “B. A.’s” transportation problem is scarcely serious enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction; all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tramcar while its seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or, if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.

I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires’ new subway. Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the “Subterraneo” operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once, two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the surface lines it belongs to the Tranvías Anglo-Argentina, a British corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six per cent. of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality. The argentino is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and resources.

The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same, news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, “Drop one cent,” changed to “Echad 10 centavos,” which is significant of the difference in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the tenth of a peso normally worth barely forty-three cents. One’s impression of being back in “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” however, is certain to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first tren subterraneo. The Porteño believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding himself. Moreover, the “Subterraneo” is British, and it retains the dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a billete suplementario before he is granted his freedom. There are no express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to “Prepare yourself to leave the coach before arriving at the station of destination” take the place of any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous opportunity of “recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,” but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and station employees.

Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and every evening great commuters’ trains, more palatial than the average of those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night with the majority of “B. A.’s” business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places; Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of the races that have amalgamated to form the modern Porteño; one would naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded and narrow ones down town. Though the Porteño has inherited the Spaniard’s preference for taking his front yard inside the house, neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air of most Latin-American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.

The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region. There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York; the children of the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the conventillos, or single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again.

Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native argentino in Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea. The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild gauchos from the pampa, the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that troop through the pages of “Amalia” and kindred stories of the past century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city of our own land is more completely “citified” than the Argentine capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to the Argentine Republic than to the United States—a mere five million who came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War—a disproportionate number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days’ free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with the communal abrazo as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more.

The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native speech of “B. A.” and the boína of the Basques is so common a headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball team. Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find new clientèle in the larger cities of the interior.

It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly a “white man’s town.” The one negro I ever saw there was posted before the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada; while the United States has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five. Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English, Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their family names, but pronouncing them “O-co-nór,” “Kel-yée,” “O-bree-én” and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth of Latin gesticulation.

To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not self-governing; as a Federal District—the most populous one in the world, by the way—it is ruled by an intendente appointed by the national executive. But its influence on the national life is more potent than that of Washington and New York combined; as it has more “influential citizens” and large property owners than all the rest of the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the case of most “self-governing” cities. Besides, it is one of the distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of “graft” is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs, our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a nation.

It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for two years when he reaches maturity; practically there is by no means room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was already in force long before the European war. The argentino, however, goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity, issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the simpler cédula de identidad for non-citizens. The temporary resident, and even the citizen, may “get by” for a time without this little volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the attention of the police, the one who can produce his libreto is far less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call one’s existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The argentinos have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and cédula are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged public offices, in which prints of all the applicant’s fingers are filed away under the number inscribed on his libreto, and where courteous attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public. In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to time his military and civic record.

But to come to the polls, now that we are armed with the document indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries, Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos Aires’ immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls “in groups,” and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the Porteño stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty. The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on the proper line of his libreto. This latter formality is of such importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent omission. For the new law in the Argentine requires each citizen to vote. Unless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the citizen whose libreto does not show, at the next revision by authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine.

The most cynical of observers could scarcely have suspected any “crookedness” in the election as it was carried out that day in Buenos Aires. Outside the capital things were perhaps a trifle less ideal; at least tales of strife drifted in for some time afterward from the remote provinces, where the familiar old South American experience of seeing the cacique, the hereditary “boss,” impose his will with a heavy and sometimes a bloody hand was still repeated. But there was considerable evidence that the entire country is improving in this respect. Those who lie awake nights worrying about the future development of foreign lands need not lose much sleep over the Argentine, for here at least is one South American country unquestionably able to work out its own destiny.

The argentino is in no such breathless haste as the American to know the result of his elections. The newspapers of the following morning carried many columns of comment on the aspect of the capital and the principal towns of the provinces under the new law, but not a hint of the future make-up of the legislative body. Weeks later the retiring congress met in their new palace, and laboriously fell to counting the ballots from all the republic, announcing the results piecemeal from day to day, and causing the votes to be publicly burned in a corner of the still unfinished grounds when the count had been verified.

It goes without saying, since military service is one of the duties of citizenship, that Argentine women do not vote. In fact, there is almost no evidence of a desire on their part to do so. A very small group of sufragistas did make a demonstration in the capital on election day, sending through the streets an automobile decorated with banners, flowers, and femininity. But as the four young ladies in the tonneau were both comely and exquisitely dressed, the apathetic by-standers took the attitude of considering them rather as exhibits in national beauty and charm than for what they purported to be—all, that is, except the police, who ungallantly took the group into custody for violating the new law against electioneering on the day of balloting.

Perhaps the greatest personal surprise which befell me during the election was to be asked by a policeman at one of the polls before which I illegally loitered for a moment whether I desired to vote. One is so palpably, so noticeably a “gringo” in other Latin-American countries that it had never occurred to me that I might be taken for a citizen in the Argentine. In nearly all the rest of South America the foreign resident remains an estranjero all his days; even his native-born children are apt to be called “hijo de inglés, de italiano, de alemán”; in the Argentine he is soon accepted as one of the cosmopolitan race of the Silvery Republic. The Argentine, and perhaps Uruguay, seems to be the only country south of our Rio Grande capable of giving the immigrant an entirely new deal in the game of life and of completely absorbing him into the body politic, at least by the second generation. The sons of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians who took up their residence below the Plata are no more English, French, and Italian than they would be if their fathers had come to the United States. If any reference to their origin comes up in conversation, it is as something casual, unimportant, like the color of their hair and eyes. During my stay in the southern republic the son of an American dentist who had established himself in Buenos Aires a generation ago lost his life in a foolhardy airplane flight undertaken for the delectation of a group of admiring young ladies, on the eve of an official attempt to fly over the Andes. The temperament which caused him to accept such a challenge under the circumstances was as typically Latin-American as were the flowers, poems, and street names which were heaped upon “our national hero” by his bereaved Argentine fellow-countrymen. In Peru or Colombia his exploit might have been noted, but he would still have been an americano.

The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much the same feeling toward the madre patria as the average American has toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful. The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing butt of Spanish drama. The Porteño never says he speaks Spanish, though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England; even in his school books he calls it the idioma nacional.

But the argentino is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by anything suggestive of manual labor. No Porteño of standing would dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great estancias cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes, and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain.

The prevailing attitude toward life, including as it does an exaggerated pride in personal appearance, gives Buenos Aires a plethora of labor-fearing fops whose main purpose in life seems to be to establish the false impression that they are the scions of aristocratic old families of uncomputed wealth. Behold one of these frauds in his daily peregrination, for he is too typical of the Buenos Aires point of view to be passed over as a mere individual. At an aristocratic hour of the afternoon he may be seen descending the steps of the far-famed, more than ornate Jockey Club (pronounced “Shocky Cloop” in the Argentine) in the patrician Calle Florida. His faultless black felt hat, carefully creased at the front and back of the crown but full in the middle, the bow of the band at the back of his head, is set at the twenty degree angle, tilting to the rear, of the “last cry” of fashion. A silk scarf of much yet subdued color, a tan suit cut low in front and retreating suddenly below, the two coat buttons close together, displaying much silver-and-gray waistcoat, the cuffed trousers razor-edged, surmounting patent-leather shoes topped by silver-gray spats, one lavendar glove, with what may be a diamond ring bulging through one of the fingers, its wrist folded back over the hand it covers and in which its mate is carried, completes his attire, though not his make-up. A brilliant carnation in the lapel, a green-black overcoat of camel-hair, blanket-like texture, drawn together behind by a half-belt fastened to buttons on the sides, the skirts of the wide-spreading variety, thrown with ostensible carelessness over the left arm, and a silver-headed cane grasped by the middle at the latest approved angle, in the bare hand, complete the sartorial picture. On the chronically disappointed face cultivated by the gilded youth of Latin-America there is an aristocratic pose, beneath which lurks a faint hint of the Bowery, particularly when its possessor turns to ogle those of the passing ladies who are ogle-worthy. Arrived in the street, he opens with grand manner a silver cigarette-case and lights in the latest fashion a monogrammed cigarette, summons a taxi with a languid, world-weary air by slightly raising his cane, steps in and rides out of sight of the Jockey Club, alights, pays the sixty centavos fare of the first fifteen hundred meters—and walks to the ten-dollar-a-month room he shares with a companion. At the Jockey Club races hundreds of these real or counterfeit favorites of fortune may be seen on the hottest days in those same lavendar gloves—or rather, their spotless replica—pulling out little pocket mirrors every few minutes to reassure themselves on their personal charms, or attempting to add to them by giving a new curl to their mustaches.

SOUTH AMERICA

Physical exertion, even for exercise sake, has little place in the scheme of life of these dandies, or of the majority of youths even of the genuinely wealthy and patrician class. Of late certain influences have been working for improvement in this matter, but they are still hampered by the awkwardness of inexperience as well as laggard costumbre. Out at Tigre, a cluster of islands and channels some miles up the bank of the Plata, young men of the class that in the United States would pride themselves on a certain expertness in sports may be seen rowing about with the clumsiness and self-consciousness of old maids, their shirts bunched up under their suspenders, their bodies plainly uncomfortable in trousers inclined by the dictates of fashion, as well as by the unwonted exertion, to climb to their chests, the occasional young woman in the back seat sitting as stiffly as the model in a corset-shop window.

The feminine sex of the same class does not, of course, yield to the males in the matter of personal adornment. At the races, along the shaded drives of Palermo of an afternoon, above all in the narrow Calle Florida a bit later in the day, fashion may be seen preening itself in frank self-admiration. In the material sense the Calle Florida is merely another of those inadequate streets of the old town, four or five blocks back from the waterfront, and given over to the most luxurious shops,—jewelers, modistes, tailleurs de luxe. But Florida is more than a street; it is an institution. For at least a generation it has been the unofficial gathering-place of the élite, in so far as there can be any such in so large a city, taking the place in a way of the Sunday night promenade in the central plaza of smaller Latin-American towns. Up to a few years ago the carriages drove directly from the daily promenade in Palermo to join the procession that crawled back and forth along the few blocks of Florida between the Avenida de Mayo and the Plaza San Martín, the ladies in them affecting that air of lassitude which seems to be most attractive to the frankly admiring cavalier south of the Rio Grande. But the day came when the narrow callejón could no longer contain all those who demanded admission to the daily parade and mutual admiration party, and the intendente solved the problem by closing the street to vehicles during certain hours of the late afternoon. There is still a procession on wheels from eleven in the morning until noon, given over particularly to débutantes ostensibly on shopping tours, though invariably surrounded by long lines of gallants and would-be novios; but the principal daily corso is now made on foot, and admiring males may without offense or conspicuousness pass near enough in the throng that fills the street from wall to wall to their particular ideal to catch the scent of her favorite perfume. Nor does that require undue proximity, for the most circumspect ladies of Buenos Aires see nothing amiss in making an appeal to the olfactory senses which in other lands would lead to unflattering conclusions.

The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment. Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy” is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever Argentine waters are navigable.

The gaudy ostentation of this nouveau riche city of Latin-Iberian origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall, as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors. They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks. Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from the transaction, for the Recoleta is the cemetery of Buenos Aires, absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it, and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or seats on the stock exchange.

“Le cheval est la plus noble conquête que l’homme ait jamais fait,” runs an inscription, from Buffon, over the portals of the far-famed race-track in Palermo, which, from the intellectual heights of the Jockey Club, is no doubt true. It suggests, however, an attempt on the part of the argentinos to deceive themselves into believing that they attend the races in such hordes every Thursday and Sunday because of their love of horses, rather than to indulge their genuinely Spanish infatuation for gambling. This same hint of hypocrisy, of kow-towing to Mrs. Grundy, which is ordinarily little in evidence in the Latin-American character, also smirks from the tickets of the lottery maintained by the Federal Government, which calls itself the “Loteria de Beneficencia Nacional.” How widespread is this Iberian desire to get something for nothing is shown by the fact that the Argentine not only maintains the national lottery, with regular drawings every ten days and frequent special drawings with enormous prizes, but two other official games of chance, run by the Provinces of Buenos Aires and of Tucumán.

The gambling at Palermo is on the pari mutuel, or pooled bets system. That is, those who wish to place a wager on a race—and virtually everyone on the grounds seems to have that desire as often as a race is announced—crowd their way to one of the many windows, and purchase as many bet-tickets as inclination or the state of their pocketbooks suggests. These tickets are of two kinds,—Ganador (Winner) and Placé. All money wagered on that race is pooled, the Jockey Club, to which the whole establishment belongs, skimming off ten per cent. for itself and distributing the rest among those holding winning tickets. Thus when a favorite wins there are so many players to share the returns that one often gets little more than his money back. There are none of those hundred-to-one chances to make the excitement of large hopes worth the risk of a small loss. Now and again an “outsider” wins at Palermo, but it is a far more common experience to wager two pesos, to see one’s choice come in a neck or a length ahead of the entire field—and to be paid two pesos and ten centavos at the booking windows.

The Porteños seem to get much entertainment out of their race-track, for all the slimness of the average winnings. The sumptuous pavilion, confined to the use, free of charge, of members of the Jockey Club and their guests, is always well patronized; the adjoining concrete stand, called the “Paddock,” has its throng of seven-peso spectators even on days when weather and grounds are not inviting to the sport; the swarms of garden variety men and women who surrender two pesos for the privilege of jostling one another in the other stands and about the betting booths show an even less blasé interest. On fine days many canopied tea-tables are set out on the smooth gravel space before the Jockey Club pavilion, and there may be seen Porteño fashion at its gaudiest. The entire place is honeycombed with passageways for the use of an army of officials, contestants, bet sellers and bet payers, the latter superhuman in their facility in mental arithmetic. From the upper seats one may look off across three complete racetracks, one within the other and enclosing a lake and a small park, to the red-brown Plata, stretching dull and featureless to the horizon. One might moralize and point out the burden imposed on the mass of the population to support the Jockey Club, perhaps the most ornate place of its kind in the world, and surround the few thousand club members with luxury, could one overlook the fact that if the average argentino were denied the privilege of risking his money on the races or in the lottery, he would find other ways to hazard it, if only by betting on the number of rains a year or the number of traffic blocks per hour in the downtown streets.

Of other forms of public entertainment Buenos Aires has its fair share. The theater list for a given day numbers twenty-five performances, ranging from the opera to a circus and a frontón given over to the Basque game of pelota—this, too, without counting the ubiquitous “movie.” Serious drama has comparatively little standing, the popular taste running to flippant one-act Spanish zarzuelas or to the maudlin and undress, with the audiences overwhelmingly male. Vaudeville bills are apt to be cosmopolitan, each “artist” speaking his mother tongue, for there is slight native “talent,” and an American negro doing a clog dance that would not win him a single “hand” at home is much applauded, since, coming from abroad, he must be good. A “national company” giving native plays of real literary and histrionic merit was conspicuous by its rarity.

Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense. Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris. Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an insinuating look from the waiter. The Porteño, like the southern European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the lecherías at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price.

The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex, and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not been unknown in the municipal courts.

“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy estancieros who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word campo, calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily penetrating, just as the pampero, the suffocating norther of the summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His winter season is so short that the average argentino makes little or no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with artificial warmth.

A few years ago Buenos Aires caught a virulent case of puritanism from some unknown source and made a concerted attack on notorious immorality. The more vulgar features of night life were driven across the Riachuelo, a filthy little stream that bounds the city and the federal district on the south. There, beyond the jurisdiction of the city police—since the section is subject only to the laws of the Province of Buenos Aires, with its capital far away at La Plata—though still virtually within the city limits, are gathered sailors’ recreation houses and the most squalid vice. In Porteño speech “beyond the Riachuelo” is the equivalent of “outside the bounds of decency,” and in the moral shambles of this region public entertainments reach a degradation which is beyond American imagination.

In the capital itself things are not yet morally immaculate. The argentino looks upon the “social evil” rather in the French than the American manner,—as something unavoidable, not particularly reprehensible, and to be regulated rather than driven under cover. Vice may be more widely spread than in our own large cities, but it is less openly crude and vulgar, with more of the frankness and at the same time of the chic naughtiness of the French. This is perhaps natural, for not only is Paris the Porteño’s beloved model, but probably at least half the women of this class come from France. Many other nationalities are represented, but the rarest of all are native women. Whether Argentine girls are “virtuous by constraint,” as some cynics have it, or the national wealth is so great that few are forced to resort to the last means of winning a livelihood, the fact remains that the predatory female of Buenos Aires is almost certain to be a foreigner. Yet there are few opportunities for women outside the home. Typists, clerks, and the like are almost all men; in the biggest, and almost the only, department store in Buenos Aires 2360 men and 640 girls were employed on the day that official duties caused me to investigate the question. Women, however, are steadily forging ahead as teachers in the numerous and increasingly excellent public schools. Buenos Aires, by the way, shows an illiteracy of barely ten per cent. for all its continuous immigration. It has given insufficient attention to the development of school playgrounds; its boys do not grow up with that love for athletics which brings with it the worship of good health and physical perfection of the body that is so potent an enemy of bad habits. Moreover, their elders treat certain matters with a levity both of speech and example which is not inclined to reform the rising male generation. In the moral attitude of the Argentine capital there is much that could advantageously be corrected, but there are civic beauties that would be the pride of almost any city of our own land. For all the deadly flatness of its site and its lack of landscape, it has a certain charm; like all great cities it is cruel and heartless, with wrath-provoking contrasts; and on the whole it is not particularly lovable.

CHAPTER II
ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES

In my daily rounds as “errand boy” I soon discovered that the Porteño is not a particularly pleasant man with whom to do business. To begin with, he is overwhelmed with a sense of his own importance, of that of his city as the greatest, or at least soon to be greatest, city on the footstool, and seems constantly burdened with the dread of not succeeding in impressing those importances upon all visitors. There is as great an air of concentrated self-sufficiency in Buenos Aires as in New York, a similar self-complacency, the same disdainfulness of anything from the insignificant bit of backwoods outside the city limits, a frank attitude of disbelief in the possibility of ever learning anything from those uncouth persons who have the misfortune not to be Porteños, and with it all a provincialism scarcely to be equaled off the Island of Manhattan. But the Porteño has less reason to boast of efficiency in his business methods than has his prototype of the North. From the American point of view he is decidedly slow. The telephone, for instance, has never been developed into a real aid to business in Buenos Aires. The service is incredibly deficient, not simply sometimes imperfect, but deficient in the sense which that word has to those who have lived and attempted to telephone in Paris. At the time of my erranding there were seven thousand telephone subscribers in Buenos Aires—with a population rapidly approaching two million; and it was so impossible to be added to the list that persons surrendering their instrument had only to mention that fact in the “Want” columns of a newspaper to sell at a price equal to the bonus paid for an opera box the privilege of being the next to rent it. Yet once the telephone is in, one’s troubles have only begun. Most Porteño business men prefer to do without one and go in person to see their professional adversaries. In fact the atrociousness of the telephone service was the chief raison d’être of my position in the consulate.

Having squirmed and shouldered one’s way through the narrow human streams of the business district to the door of the building sought, there begins the serious problem of reaching the desired individual. The elevator service, in the few cases where there is one, is on a par with the telephone. Nor is it reassuring to the timid, for on the ground-floor cage there is almost certain to be a conspicuous sign to the effect that, “As there exists a stairway, persons riding in the elevator do so at their own peril.” Buenos Aires has not quite shaken off the suspicion of a diabolical nature in all such new-fangled contraptions. A man was killed by an elevator in an office building during my days in the capital; when I chanced to pass the place nearly two weeks later, the entire elevator-shaft had been gutted by municipal order and three policemen were still stationed at the foot of it, apparently to prevent anyone from climbing the shaft instead of using the stairway.

Arrived at the proper floor, you find yourself face to face with the greatest difficulty of all. From that moment you must wage pitched battle, for the inevitable door-keepers are insolent beyond measure, though sometimes with a veneer of Latin-American-style courtesy, and so numerous that to pass them is like running a gantlet. To get as far as the subsecretary’s subsecretary is often a strenuous day’s work. It makes no difference how important your errand may be. These stupid Cerebuses see no distinction whatever between the official spokesman of the august Consul General de los Estados Unidos de Norte América and a book agent. Nor will foresight help you. For the great man inside is invariably behind his schedule, scores of other applicants are sure to be lined up in the anteroom, and though you have an appointment with him for two, you are more likely than not to be still waiting at four. This waiting in the anteroom is so customary in the Argentine that antesalar has become an accepted verb of the idioma nacional. Public officials, from ministers to the lowest class of secretary, have mobs before their doors during all their office hours, but instead of increasing the latter until they cover the work to be done, or hurrying things up in order to receive all applicants, they come late, fritter away much of their time in non-essentials, and leave early, so that most of the crowd has the pleasure of coming again the next day, and the next. Doctors and dentists are particularly remiss in this form of inefficiency. They, by the way, charge an admission fee, that must be paid to the door-keeper before the patient can get in, and which has no bearing on the regular charges “for professional services.”

The reason for this stagnation in the anteroom becomes apparent when you at last step across the magic threshold. The American business man presses a button as soon as he has heard you, and the thing is done at once; the argentino hems and haws, spends considerable time on drawing-room courtesies and formalities, murmurs, “Ah-er-why-sí, señor-er, come around to-morrow at three,” though it would be quite as easy to make his decision at once. Most Porteño business men with whom I came in contact seemed to keep their minds on ice, or in a safety vault somewhere, and to require time to go and consult them—for no one who knows the Latin-American can even suspect that they wished to talk the matter over with their wives. The saddest part of the whole story is that when you come around mañana at three, the man either will not be there or will be conferring with those who have appointments from twelve to one, and will not have given your question an instant’s thought since his door closed behind you.

There is a certain English and German influence in “B. A.” business houses, and a corresponding native influence on the rather numerous English and German business men in the city which makes them almost as prone to procrastination as the Porteño. Five o’clock tea is served in all offices, including congress and newspaper rooms. Of late years this is often really tea, rather than mate, though black coffee and liqueurs are still found on most portable sideboards. A British air of deliberation pervades the commercial caste, though the pressure of competition and high cost of living is gradually having its effect, both in the increased pace of business and the lengthening of office hours, which, if they begin late and are broken by tea-time, often last until seven or even eight in the evening. “B. A.” still retains, however, a few of those features which visiting Americans below the Rio Grande are wont in their exasperation to dub “Spig.” There is the post-office, for instance. It is as unsafe to assume common sense on the part of Buenos Aires postal officials as of those in the most backward parts of South America. Red tape, indifference, languor, and stupidity flourish almost as vigorously in the correo principal in the Casa Rosada as at the crest of the Andes. You will probably find your letters filed under the name “Esquire,” if your correspondents affect that medieval title; if you wish to buy a stamp, the customary way is to go to one of the tobacco-shops obliged to keep them, and buy it at a premium. Those who insist on getting their stamps at the legal price must travel long distances to the post office and shove and jostle their way through a throng of Italians bent on sending home a part of their wages, to reach at last a wholly inadequate hole in the wall behind which the female clerks are deeply engrossed in gossip.

There is a reminder of some of our own overambitious towns in the argentino’s eagerness to boost population, as if there were some virtue in mere figures, even though those be false. The national census was taken during my sojourn in the republic—all in a single day by the way, which was declared a holiday—and the method of computing the population was not one to cause it to shrink. Long beforehand walls and windows were covered with so many placards resembling those of a vaudeville performance that the cynical observer might easily have been justified in supposing that the printers had a special influence with the government. On the day set not only was every foreigner included, even though he happened only to be spending a few hours in crossing the country, but orders were issued to count, through the consuls, all argentinos living abroad and all persons of whatever nationality at the moment under the Argentine flag, whether on the high seas or on steamers far up the Paraná and Uruguay rivers quite outside the national jurisdiction. I was counted at my hotel, filling in a blank under the eye of the Italian proprietor, though I had only the day before returned from a foreign country and was on the point of leaving for another. The enumerators received ten centavos for each person enumerated, which naturally did not tend toward a decrease of population, that sum being paid by the government—though it turned out later that in many backwoods districts it had also been collected from the enumerated. Placards were then posted ordering any person within the republic who had not been counted on the date set to come to town and present himself before the Census Commission. These intensive methods resulted eventually in the announcement that 1,490,675 persons were living in Buenos Aires on the day in question.

If there chanced to be no “outside work” for the moment to keep me scurrying through the avalanche of taxicabs, or no “office boy” duties about the consulate, there was always plenty of recreation to be found in watching the assorted humanity that filed in and out of the outer office. Now a penniless sailor would drift in, to address the work-swamped vice consul in such words as, “General, I ayn’t goin’ t’ tell you no stories, ’cause you’re a bright man an’ you’d ketch me up at it an’ make a fool out o’ me. Only, I took just that one drink, general, just that one drink, an’ they shanghaied me an’ ’ere I am an’ I ’as a family in the States, general, s’welp me Gawd, general, an’ what am I goin’ t’ do ...” and so on, until to my multitudinous duties was added that of bouncer. Or perhaps a clean, neatly dressed young American, perpetual outdoors in his face, would step up with, “I come from Texas, that’s where my paw an’ maw lives, an’ I come down here to raise hawgs an’ I thought I’d come in an’ tell you I was in the country an’ now where can I get the best land to raise hawgs on an’ ...” another task for the overworked “office boy.” If it was one of those rare days when this continual procession of human quandaries was broken, I had only to reach at random into the files to pull out a written one:

Buenos Aires, April 25,

To the Consol of the U. S. A.

Hon. Sir:

I am reading now the news of the war (it was the time of our sending marines to Vera Cruz) and the call at the arms to volunteers. If you remember, about 7 or 8 month ago, I have writen to you from Rosario, offering my blood for your Republica. Not answer have I received about. Now if you like to take in consideration this letter, I wish to start for the war and to be incorporated in the volunteer’s corps. This is not a strange offering. I am Italiaman and I cannot to forget the time passed in the U. S. A. and the generous heart of the Americaman when my country was troubled by the sismic movements.

I live in New York six year, left the North America three year before, and am desiring now to see and live in that blessed country. Here has the hungry, and indeed to die starved in the streets. I wish better to die for the North American states. I love your land more than my country and severals of the Italiamen living in the States, believe me, Sir, will be incorporated for the war. I would to be at present in New York, not here: I well know that the international respects forbidden to answer me about, but I have not money in this poor country, and for that I can’t to start at my expenses. If you like to give me a passage, I am ready to start rightaway, and not body shall know my resolution.

Hoping in your favorable answer, I am glad to be,

Yours respectfully,

Mike Albanese.

Nor does Buenos Aires take a back seat to New York in the amusement the stroller may find in its streets. There was the incident of Easter Sunday, for instance. I went to church, but there was no special music, only a cluster of priests in barbarically resplendent robes going through some sort of silent service, so I drifted out again. There was not even the parade of new spring hats to which to look forward, for spring was still far off in Buenos Aires. In fact, the oppressive heat of early March in which I had arrived had only begun to give way to a refreshing coolness. The early autumn skies were brilliant, leaves had scarcely begun to turn color. I bought a copy of La Prensa, tucked it under an arm, and went strolling lazily up Rivadavia beyond Calle Callao, the Forty-Second street of “B. A.,” flanking the gleaming new congress building. Mounted policemen in rich uniforms, with horsetail helmets and the white gloves of holidays, here and there decorated the landscape. For some time I sauntered dreamily on at random, a trifle bored by the monotony of life, for I had already been more than a month in Buenos Aires and had tasted most of the excitement it has to offer.

I was half aware of crossing the broad Plaza Once de Setembro, still covered with earth from the digging of the new subway. Finally, up in the 2700 block, a man standing on a corner asked me if I could tell him where Dr. Martinez lived. I replied that I was a stranger in those parts. So was he. That was fairly evident to the naked eye, for he was decidedly countrified in appearance and actions, though he was clean and well dressed. He had just come up from Bahía Blanca, he said, and when he got off the train in the station, he had met one of those men with a huascar, a rope, over one shoulder and a number on his cap—a changador, or porter, I explained—who asked him if he wanted his baggage carried. He did, and gave the man his maleta and also the slip of paper with the address of Dr. Martinez on it. Then the changador said it was customary to pay in advance, and as he had no change he gave him a ten-peso bill and told him to bring back the small money.

The poor fellow was so evidently a simple, good-hearted countryman who had never been in a large city before that I could not but admire, as well as pity, his unsuspecting nature. Of course the changador had disappeared with the valise, the ten pesos, and the address; and as the campesino did not even know the doctor’s first name, things looked rather dark for him, for Martinez rivals Smith in directories and telephone books. Still, it was no concern of mine, so after giving him my sympathy and advising him to report the matter to the police, just for form’s sake, I turned to go on.

Just then another man passed us at a brisk pace and the poor countryman appealed to him for advice. The newcomer was quite evidently a Porteño, a man under thirty, good-looking, with the frank and open countenance one recognizes at once as belonging to an honest man. His appearance was that of a clerk or small merchant. Knowing the countryman was in good hands, I turned away again.

But he called me back, apparently feeling more secure with me nearby. Then he told the newcomer of his hard luck. Naturally the latter was as sorry as I was. He expressed his sympathy and started on, but the countryman begged not to be abandoned in his trouble. The newcomer yielded good-naturedly to the whim of the yokel and we fell into conversation.

“You are English?” remarked the townsman, casually, but before I could answer, the countryman said with an air of finality, “No, he is German,” and as it was easier to let it go at that than to bother to correct him, I nodded. We strolled along for a block, puzzling over the sad predicament of the countryman. At length the Porteño asked pardon for butting into any man’s private affairs, but, “Did this changador get away with any of your money in the grip, too?”

“Ah, no; there I am lucky!” cried the estanciero. “Just before the train got into the station I opened the maleta and took out this roll of billetes; it is seven thousand pesos”—in the utmost innocence the fellow drew out the roll, large as a man’s forearm, a hundred-peso bill in plain sight on top. I was about to protest when the other man did so, crying:

“But, my dear sir! Do you know me? Or do you know this gentleman? Then don’t you know better than to flash seven thousand pesos around in the public streets? Why, if we were not respectable men we might tell you we knew where this Dr. Martinez lives and then lead you into any old corner and give you a puñalado and....”

“Oh, I can tell you are honest men,” replied the countryman, with a childlike smile, at which the other turned to me with:

“You see these country people live so simply and honestly at home they never dream of the dangers of the cities.”

“Yes,” I replied. Then to the countryman, “But one mustn’t always judge people by their faces,” for it was evidently up to me to say something of a harsh nature to the simple rustic.

“Exactly,” said the Porteño; “we can see a man’s face but not his heart.”

Still the countryman seemed to prefer to trust to his own judgment of physiognomy and implored us to help him find this Dr. Martinez, saying that if it was a matter of giving us ten or twenty pesos each for our trouble he would be glad to do so. The Porteño forestalled my protest by saying we were not that sort of men but that we would be glad to give him any assistance possible, out of charity. So we set out along a side street, telling the countryman to walk ahead.

“What do you think of that poor fellow?” said the Porteño; “and what if he had fallen in with some dishonest shyster instead of us? Say, you know I think the man is ill and....”

“Oh, señor,” he called to him, “you won’t think I am prying into your private affairs, but is it some medical matter you want to see this Dr. Martinez about? Because if it is, you know there are so many fakes posing as doctors here in the city....”

“No, no; it is not for a medical matter at all,” returned the countryman; “it is merely a family affair,” and he went on again. But before long he turned back and to my astonishment there were tears visible on his cheeks.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is true I do not know you, but I have seen and talked with you and I am sure you are honest men, not the kind who would outwit a poor countryman who knows nothing of the city and its ways. So I am going to tell you just how things stand so you can advise me what to do.

“My father and I own a big estancia down near Bahía Blanca. We are very well-to-do—you will excuse my mentioning that—though we do not know much of cities and their ways. Some time ago a man living on our estancia died. He was thought to be a beggar, but when we came to disinfect his hut what was our surprise to find inside his old mattress seven thousand pesos in these little round gringo gold pieces....”

“Ah, he means English sovereigns,” put in the Porteño.

“Father was going to turn this over to the authorities,” the countryman went on, “but our lawyer laughed at the idea, as the fellow had no heirs and the authorities would only stick it into their own pockets. And as the man had lived and died on our estancia, surely no one was more entitled to the money than father. So he put it away in his strong boxes—though, to be sure, it was a small amount to us and we never needed it. Well, a few weeks ago my poor papá”—here he wiped away a tear—“was riding along when his horse ran into a cerco de alambre de púas. But perhaps you city gentlemen do not know what a cerco de alambre de púas is?”

“Oh, yes,” we both cried, and the Porteño added, “it is that wire with sharp points on it that you use out in the country to keep the cattle or horses in a field.”

“Well, my poor father rode into one of those fences and his face was so cut and torn that it has all turned black on that side, and the doctor came and told us it was scurvy or cancer or some of those awful diseases with a long name, and that poor papá would never get well.”

When he had blown his nose the campesino went on, and one could not help pitying the poor chap, trying to hide his grief, for the people of South America certainly have much family affection, especially those from the country:

“The doctor told us to call the priest, so I went and got Father Acosta, our old family padre, who baptized me, and when he confessed father, he found out about the seven thousand pesos. Well, he said at once that father could not go to heaven with that on his conscience. So he told me to take the money and come to Buenos Aires at once—for of course there is no hope now of finding any of the beggar’s heirs—to see this Dr. Martinez and, giving him two thousand pesos for his poor patients, as a sort of commission, to have him take the other five thousand and send half of it to some church to say masses for the repose of that poor aviator who was killed the other day, and the other half to some good hospital, to be used for the poor and those with bad hands and feet....”

“Ah, he means cripples,” put in the Porteño; “that’s what we call that kind of poor people here in the city,” smiling upon our simple companion. Naturally we two had looked at each other frequently during this tale, for it scarcely seemed possible that even a campesino from the utmost pampa could be so unsophisticated. Now, was it a question of the priest and this Dr. Martinez being confederates, or was the priest as simple as the other yokels?

“If you don’t mind another personal question,” said the Porteño, “do you know this Dr. Martinez?”

“Ah, no, but he has his name in the paper, in La Prensa.”

“My dear señor!” gasped the townsman. “Why, don’t you know that either I, who am no doctor, or this gentleman, whom I think I am right in saying is none either, can pay a newspaper sixty or eighty centavos to put in an announcement that we are doctors, or anything else? Why, my poor compatriot, a newspaper is merely a beast of burden that carries anything you put upon it.”

“But,” gasped the countryman, “don’t the editors know people before they put in their notices?”

“Poor simpleton,” murmured the Porteño. “Now, I must be getting on, for I have friends coming to see me, but I’ll tell you what I should do in your case. I should go to some of the largest and most respectable commercial houses here in the city and turn this matter over to them, taking their receipt and....”

“Ah, señores,” cried the countryman, almost in tears, “this is purely a matter between my father and his conscience. I would not have it become public under any circumstances; and besides, my poor father is so sick that I must take the evening train back to Bahía Blanca at all odds. And—excuse me, gentlemen, for mentioning it, but I have an infirmity—and where can I go and sit down for a few minutes? Here on the sidewalk?”

In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American consul general

The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires

A Patagonian landscape

The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio Negro of southern Argentine

“Válgame Diós, no!” cried the Porteño, catching him by a sleeve, “not in the street, or you will have a crowd gathered around you. I’ll tell you what you can do. Go down that way a block and you’ll find a saloon. Go in and buy a drink of something and ask them where you can sit down to drink it.”

The countryman left us, and the Porteño took advantage of the opportunity to talk things over with me.

“It is evident that the simple fellow is in great danger of being done by this Dr. Martinez, or somebody else, for how do we know he will not take and keep the whole seven thousand? Now I am an honest man, and I believe you are, too; are you not? Then it is our duty to take care that this money gets where it belongs. You surely must know some German church here in town where they can say masses for that poor aviator. We can go and give the priest twenty-five hundred; and then there are plenty of good hospitals, the German, the English, and so forth, where they will accept and use for the poor the other twenty-five hundred. And then we will not only have seen that the money goes where it was intended, but there will be a linda, a pretty little commission of two thousand pesos to divide between us. Can I depend on you to help me save this poor fellow and his money?”

I was, of course, considerably surprised at such a proposition from a man apparently so straightforward, and for the first time felt it my duty to stay in the case until I had seen the money properly disposed of; the equivalent of three thousand dollars was no sum to see scattered among sharpers. So I nodded, and when the countryman came back, the Porteño explained to him:

“Now, my friend, you do not know this Dr. Martinez. How do we know he will not take the money and spend it on himself, on dissipation, in short, to talk plainly between men, on francesas?”

“Francesas?” cried the countryman, with a puzzled air.

“Yes, on bad women, on those who sell their love,” explained the Porteño; “we call them francesas here in the city because so many of them come from France.”

“Ah, yes, I have heard there are such women in the cities, poor things,” said the farmer. “Also, it is only too true that this doctor may not be honest. But tell me, gentlemen, what am I to do? My poor papá dying down there in Bahía Blanca and——” again the poor fellow was weeping and it was lucky we were on a small side street behind the Once station or we should soon have had a crowd about us.

“Now, you do know us,” went on the Porteño, “even if only for a short time, and I propose that you turn this money over to us, let us place the five thousand in churches and hospitals we know of, and then divide the two thousand between us as our commission for our trouble, which we would surely be as much entitled to as Dr. Martinez, whom no one knows.”

To my astonishment the simple countryman jumped at the idea, either because he was too unsophisticated to suspect anyone, or too anxious to get back to his sick father to give any thought to the possibilities of fraud.

“Only, it is a commission of two thousand between you,” he specified, “not for each.”

“Surely, surely, we know that,” answered the Porteño.

We continued our stroll down the back street. The countryman, quite evidently relieved to have the matter off his mind, reached for the seven thousand pesos. Then an idea seemed to strike him, as if all our talk about the dangers of the city had at last awakened a bit of suspicion in his breast. He left the roll in his pocket and said smilingly ingenuously:

“But, señores—you will excuse my suggesting such a thing—but before I turn this seven thousand over to you—and I shall place it in the hands of this gentleman” (indicating me) “since I met him first, and you will give me a paper with your names saying you will use the money as my poor father desires—but just so I can say to him when I get back that I turned the commission over to two honest gentlemen, who will carry it out, I—you will excuse me, gentlemen, I am sure, if I speak frankly—I just want you to show me in some way that you are not indigent persons. In short—you will pardon me, señores—but just so my poor father can die in peace”—here he wiped another large tear from his wind-and-sun-burned cheek—“I wish to be able to tell him that you are persons of enough wealth so that you will not need to spend this money on yourselves, just some little proof, gentlemen.”

“Surely, most just and wise,” cried the Porteño, “and I am certainly not the man to be unwilling to show you that I am a respectable person. Of course I am not carrying about with me any such large sum as you have, but if it is a matter of a thousand or so pesos, I never go about without that amount on my person.”

Here he pulled back his coat a bit and displayed a smaller roll of bills, though with the extreme circumspection of the city-bred man. The countryman seemed entirely satisfied with this proof of honesty and, shaking hands with the other most heartily, assured him that he had every confidence in him. Then he turned his simple face questioningly upon me.

I could not, of course, being a mere vagabonding “errand boy,” make any display of wealth. But it seemed so eminently my duty to keep an eye on the Porteño until the countryman’s money had come into indisputably honest hands that I determined to invent myself a small fortune with which to keep my standing in the case. I drew out the nine pesos and some change in my pocket with an apologetic countenance and addressed my companions:

“I’m sorry not to be able to show at once that I am a person of means, but I am so well aware of the dangers of large cities that I never carry with me more than enough for the day’s expenses, and of course you are not interested in seeing this tiny amount,” which I then put back into my pocket.

“But you must have money somewhere,” asked the Porteño, anxiously, “just enough to show this gentleman we can be trusted to carry out his commission? Come over here a moment. You will excuse us for a minute, won’t you?” he added, addressing the campesino.

“Yes, but señores,” cried the latter, almost in tears, “you are not going to talk about anything to my hurt?”

“On the contrary, it is entirely for your good,” answered the townsman. “Just excuse us a moment until we arrange this matter to your satisfaction.”

The two of us crossed the street, where the Porteño asked me again if I could not show I had money.

“Why, yes,” I lied, determined now at all costs not to let him take unfair advantage of the incredibly simple estanciero, “I have money in the—er—the German bank and in the German consulate. But how can I get it out, to-day being Sunday? Of course, if the bank-book would be sufficient proof for our friend, I could hurry home and get that.”

“Where do you live?”

“Tucumán 1671.”

“Well, now, how could we arrange?” puzzled the townsman. “You could go and get the bank-book. Or shall I go with you? No, it will be better for me to stay here with our friend, for with seven thousand pesos in his pocket, which anyone might take away from him—but you could run home and get the bank-book, and that perhaps would keep him interested until to-morrow, when the banks open—for of course, being a man from the pampa, he won’t know that a bank-book is proof of having money—and to-morrow you could get the money out and.... How much money have you in the bank?”

“I can’t say exactly,” I answered, ostensibly cudgeling my brains to remember, “perhaps a little over six thousand pesos.”

“Ah, that’s fine,” said the Porteño, his eyes shining, “because that, with what I have, will just about equal the seven thousand our friend has, and give him full confidence.” We turned back toward the countryman.

“Of course,” went on my companion, bringing his lips close to my ear, “when we get that seven thousand—and I know you are not the sort of man who will beat me out of my share just because it is going to be put into your hands. Are you?” When I shook my head he grasped my hand and shook it fervently. “When we get that seven thousand it won’t much matter whether the priest and the hospital—you understand me, as man to man, don’t you?”

I gave him a wise look as we rejoined the countryman, who was nursing his feet as if city pavements were already blistering them. When we told him that if he wished to see my six thousand—for, as we expected, he had little knowledge of, or faith in, bank-books—he would have to stay over until the next day, he protested, naturally, that he must take the evening train, his poor father being likely to die at any moment. But he was apparently as tractable as he was simple, for when it was all explained to him, that I would go home at once and be back within half an hour, or forty minutes at the most, with my bank-book, that then we would all three spend the afternoon and night together somewhere until the banks opened in the morning, he admitted that that was probably the best way out of it, that “papá” always had had a strong constitution after all, that the money must be properly placed before he returned home, and after drawing out and looking at the roll of seven thousand again and asking if we wanted him to count it to show that it was really that amount, to which the Porteño hastily protested and begged him to get it back into his pocket as soon as possible, he agreed to our plan. I was to catch a car home at once, get my bank-book, and return to them on that same corner.

There being no car in sight, I set off at a swift pace along the tram line. As I looked around to see if the car was coming, the two waved to me to come back. I rejoined them, and the countryman again begged me not to say a word to anyone about the matter, since it was entirely a problem between his father and his conscience. I quieted his almost tearful fears by assuring him that I lived all alone, that I had scarcely a friend in Buenos Aires, and that I was naturally of a most taciturn disposition. As I turned away again, the townsman took a few steps after me and murmured in my ear, “If you will bring along your rings and jewels, too, that will help to win his confidence.” I assured him I would bring every piece of jewelry I possessed, and hurried off once more down the street car line.

A couple of blocks beyond, where the street curved and hid my friends from view, I turned a corner. A man who seemed to have been peering out from behind it asked me if I knew “those two persons.”

“No,” I answered, “we were merely passing the time of day.”

“But don’t you know esos son ladrones—those are thieves!” he cried.

“Señor,” I replied, “my very best thanks for your kind warning, but I discovered that about half an hour ago.”

Whereupon I continued for where I had started—to keep an engagement with a fellow-countryman at the afternoon races in Palermo, a rendezvous I had for a time feared I should have to miss unless I cut short my very entertaining Easter morning with the bunco steerers.

CHAPTER III
FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS

The traveler who visits only Buenos Aires will almost certainly carry away a mistaken notion of the Argentine. There is perhaps no national capital in the world so far in advance of, so out of proportion to its nation as is the great city on what the English called the “Plate.” We of the northern hemisphere are not accustomed to cities which are their countries to the extent that Buenos Aires is the Argentine. American editors and publicists expressed astonishment, and in some cases misgiving, when our latest census showed that one tenth the population of the United States dwells in its three largest cities. Of all the people inhabiting the Argentine Republic virtually one fourth live in the capital.

The contrast between this and the great background of pampas is incredible; Buenos Aires is far more closely allied to Paris or Rome than to the broad country over which it rules. There are several reasons for this disparity, besides the general South American tendency to dress up the capital like an only son and trust that the rest of the country will pass unnoticed, like a flock of poor relatives or servants. The two principal crops of the Argentine, cattle and wheat, do not require a compact rural population. Being the chief port as well as the metropolis and capital, Buenos Aires has first choice of those who cross the sea seeking new occupations and homes. It sucks the life blood from the constant stream of immigration, leaving the “camp” a sparsely settled expanse of boundless plain and the other cities mere provincial towns, sometimes pleasant places to live in, but wholly devoid of metropolitan features. Buenos Aires is as large as Philadelphia; the second city of the Argentine is smaller than Akron, Ohio.

Numerous efforts have been made to bring about a better balance. The government offers the immigrant free transportation to any part of the country. Down on the Paseos of Colon and Julio, beneath the arcades of which Spanish and Armenian petty merchants, cheap Italian restaurants, and den-like second-hand shops make first appeal to the thin purse of the newly arrived fortune seeker, the broad brick pillars are covered with the enticements of employment agencies,—a cuadrilla of such a size wanted for railroad work three hundred miles west; so many laborers needed on an estancia in a distant province, free fare, nominal fee—just such signs as may be seen on the corner of Madison and Canal Streets in Chicago and in a score of our western cities. The wages offered are from twenty to thirty per cent. lower than for the same grade of labor in the United States at the same period, and the cost of meals somewhat higher. But it is something more than this that causes the majority of immigrants to pause and read and wander on in quest of some occupation financially less attractive in or near the capital. Possibly it is a subconscious dread of the horizonless pampas which stretch away into the unknown beyond the city; some attribute it to the now happily decreasing autocracy of grafting rural officials and the lack of government protection in districts out of touch with the capital. Or it may be nothing more than the world-wide tendency to congregate in cities. The fact remains that Buenos Aires is congested with the very laborers who are sadly needed on the great undeveloped plains of the interior.

A railroad map of the Argentine is a striking illustration of this concentration of population. As all roads once led to Rome, so do all railway lines of the Argentine converge upon Buenos Aires. Tracks radiate from the capital in every direction in which there is Argentine territory, a dense network which suggests on a larger scale the railroad yards of our great centers of transportation. No other city of the land is more than a way station compared with the all-absorbing capital. There is probably no country in the world in which it is easier to lay rails, though it is sometimes difficult to keep them above the surface. With the beginning of its real exploitation, therefore, new lines sprang up almost overnight. As in the United States beyond the Alleghenies, railroads came in most cases before highways; for though Spaniards settled in the Argentine four centuries ago, the scattered estancieros and their peons were content to ride their horses across the open plains, and the modern movement is as yet scarcely a generation old. There are many regions where the railroad is to this day the only real route; those who do not use it drive or ride at will across the trackless pampas, with thistles or waving brown grass threshing their wheels or their horses’ knees. To-day there are railways not only from Buenos Aires to every town of the adjoining provinces, but to Bolivia and Paraguay on the north, to Chile on the west, and Patagonia in the South. Long palatial trains roll out of the capital in every direction, entire trains bound for cities of which the average American has never heard the name, the destination announced by placards on the sides of the cars as in Europe—and as it should be in the United States.

With the exception of a minor French line or two, and some rather unimportant government roads of narrow gauge, all the railways of the Argentine are English, very English, in fact, with British managers and chiefs of departments, engines without bells, and with the nerve-racking screech of European locomotives, to say nothing of the British “staff” system which forces even “limited” trains to slow down at every station enough for the engineer to snatch the sort of iron scepter which is his authority for entering another section. The rolling stock, however, is more nearly American in appearance. The freight cars are large, the passenger coaches—of two classes—are built on a modified American plan, without compartments. Both in comfort and speed the main Argentine lines rival our own, though there are fewer through expresses which maintain what we would call a high rate throughout their runs. For one thing the government assesses a fine against those trains which are more than a little late without palpable excuse, and it is natural that the companies so arrange their schedules as to make such punishment unlikely, with the result that many trains have a tendency to wait at stations for the time-table to catch up with them. Nor, with the exception of the through lines to the neighboring republics, do most of the tracks forming that great network out of Buenos Aires fetch up anywhere in particular. Nearly all of them have the air of pausing in doubt on the edge of the great expanses they set out to explore, with the result that while the provinces bordering Buenos Aires are so thickly strewn with tracks that the map suggests there is not room to set down a foot between them, there are enormous tracts of territory in the central and western portions of the country wholly untouched by modern transportation. Life slows down on these many arteries of travel, too, in exact proportion to the distance from the heart from which all the Argentine is nourished. But there are indications in most cases that the pause at nowhere is only temporary, that presently the lines will summon up breath and courage to push on across the still trackless pampas.

The great drawback to travel in the Argentine is the cost, both in time and money. Distances are so great, places of any importance so far apart, that while fares are not much higher than in the United States, it takes many hours and many pesos to get anywhere worth going. Towns which look but a cannon-shot apart on the map may be reached only by several hours of travel, saddened by the despairing flatness and monotony of the desolate pampas, where there is rarely a tree to give a pleasing touch of shade, no spot of green to attract and rest the eyes, a landscape as uninviting as an unfurnished apartment.

In my double capacity of consular protégé and prospective “booster,” however, I was furnished with general passes by all the important railways, and time is no object to a mere wanderer. But for this official recognition of my unstable temperament I should probably have seen little of the Argentine, for even the man who has tramped the length of the Andes would scarcely have the patience to face on foot the endless horizon of the pampas; and “hoboing” has never been properly developed on Argentine railways. Rarely had I been given temporary carte blanche on almost every train in the country when, as a second stroke of fortune, consular business turned up which took me into various sections of the “camp” without cutting me off from my modest official income. I hastened to lay in a supply of heavy garments, for the first trip was to be south, and the end of April had brought an autumn chill even in Buenos Aires, over which birds were flying northward in great V-shaped flocks.

A general pass is more than a saving of money; it gives train officials an exalted notion of the holder’s importance, and it permits him to jump off anywhere on the spur of the moment. Yet for many miles south I saw nothing worthy of a stop. When one has already visited La Plata, capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, a short hour below the metropolis and noted for its university and its rows of venerable eucalyptus trees, there remains little to attract the eye in the flat expanse of that province as it unrolls hour after hour on any of the lines of the “Great Southern.” Several dairies, which maintain their own lecherías throughout the federal capital, punctuate the first miles; otherwise the landscape is a mere reminder of our own western prairies. Here is the same scanty grass and clumps of bushes resembling sagebrush, the same flat plain with its horizon barely rising and falling perceptibly with the motion of the train. The only unfamiliar note is the ostrich, scattered groups of which go scuttling away like huge ungainly chickens as the express disturbs them at their feeding. At least we should call this Argentine curiosity an ostrich, though science distinguishes it from a similar species in the Old World under the name of rhea darwini, and to the natives it is a ñandú. Time was when tawny horsemen pursued these great birds across the pampas, entangling their legs in the bolas, two or three ropes ending in as many heavy balls, which they swung over their heads as they rode; but that is seen no more. Even the waving plains of grass, across which the nomadic Indian roamed and the gaucho careered lassooing wild cattle, are gone. Wheat fields, bare with the finished harvest in this autumn season, alternate with short brown grass, cropped by the cattle which everywhere dot the landscape for hour after monotonous hour.

The gaucho, with his long, sharp facón stuck through his belt, who lighted his fogón out on the open pampa to prepare his asado con cuero, his beef roasted in the hide, who killed a steer for his morning beefsteak or slaughtered a lamb for a pair of chops, who rolled up in his saddle-blanket wherever night overtook him, with his daytime leather seat as pillow, has degenerated into the “hired man,” the mere peon, usually from Spain or Italy, who would be dismayed at the thought of a night without shelter or a day without prepared food. Only a scattered remnant of the real cowboys of the pampas are left, just enough to show the present domesticated generation the stuff of which their forerunners were forged; and even these are usually far away in the remotest corners of the country.

Yet the newcomers take on gradually something of the gaucho’s look, a hardiness, an air of abstraction, as if through gazing long at monotonous nothingness they come to concentrate their attention inwardly and become meditative of soul, with that solemn, self-reliant manner of men who never turn the leaves of any book but nature’s. The countrymen of Nevada or Arizona have the same weathered appearance as the groups gathered about the rare stations at which the through train momentarily halts; the saddled horses tied to wooden rails before the more pretentious buildings among the little clusters of houses set out on the unsheltered open prairie might easily be mistaken for Texas mustangs. In these groups one begins to see suggestions of Indian blood, mestizos with the yellowish-brown skin and thick black hair of the aborigines, yet with a stronger hint of European origin.

Ordinarily this region is swirling with dust, but this year the rains had been early and excessive, and the monotonous brown prairie was often flooded, the dismal houses dripping; the wide public roads were knee-deep sloughs along which tramping would indeed have been an experience. Clusters of farm buildings, generally new, stood here and there in groves of trees, planted trees, which in the Argentine are a sign of opulence, a sort of seigneurial luxury, like diamonds or liveried footmen. The trees native to the pampas being rare and scrubby, it is chiefly the imported eucalyptus standing in little clumps, English sparrows noisily gossiping among them, or rising in broken lines from the frequent lakes of mirage or shallow reality. Boisterous hackmen, sprinkled to the ears with mud, attacked in force the descending passengers at every station serving a town of size and bore them away in clumsy bespattered coaches. Huge two-wheeled carts reminiscent of England here and there labored along the bottomless road from station to town under incoming freight or outgoing country produce. Town after town was monotonously alike, the houses built of crude bricks, with an unfinished air suggesting that they were at most mere temporary stopping-places of men ready to pursue fortune elsewhere on a moment’s notice.

The chief characteristic of Argentine towns is their roominess. The space they cover is several times that of Andean cities of equal population. Though the houses often toe the street in the Arab-Spanish fashion, they are frequently far apart and the streets are wider than even Buenos Aires would care to have in her most congested section. No doubt each hamlet has a secret hint that it is soon to become a great city, and lays its plans accordingly. Next to their spaciousness and the dreary plainness of their architecture, these towns of the pampas strike the experienced South American traveler by the scarcity of their churches. The largest of them seldom shows more than a single steeple; many seem to have no places of worship whatever. Nowhere is there that suggestion common to the atmosphere of the languid cities of the Andes of a present world so unpromising that life can most advantageously be spent in preparation for the next.

The “Great Southern” carried me so far into the south that only by straining my neck could I see the Southern Cross, a tilted, less striking constellation now than when I had first made it out in far-off Central America by standing on tiptoe and peering over the horizon. The journey might almost better be made by night than by day, for Argentine sleeping-cars are comfortable and the dreary, unfurnished landscape is almost oppressive. The only natural features to arouse a flicker of interest are some rock hills near Tandil, duplicated farther on in another little rocky range known as the Sierra de la Ventana. In the first of these Buenos Aires quarries some of the stone for its building and paving, the rest being brought across the Plata from Uruguay. Few large countries have been more neglected than the Argentine in the matter of natural resources, other than agricultural. Its rare deposits of stone are far distant from where the material is needed, it has no precious minerals, almost no forests, even the coal used on its railroads must be brought from abroad. Yet it would gladly be rid of some of its stone. Through much of the south it is hampered by a tosca, a shelf of limestone a few feet below the surface, which neither water nor the long roots of the alfalfa can penetrate. In the more tropical north, particularly along the Paraná, the alfalfales produce luxuriantly for twenty years and more without renewal. In the south the calerous soil makes vigorous pastures on which fatten succulent beef and mutton, highly prized by the frigorí ficos; but the frequent droughts are disastrous in the thin soil regions, and at such times endless trains carry the sheep and “horned cattle,” as the local distinction has it, a thousand miles north to feed in the Córdoba hills.

The plain which seems never to have an end converges at last, like all the railroads to the south, in Bahía Blanca. This bustling port and considerable city, with its immense grain elevators and its facilities for transferring half the produce of the Argentine from trains to ships, is the work of a generation. It is nearly a century now since the federal government sent soldiers to establish in the vicinity of this great bay a line of defense against the Indians of Patagonia, but the town itself took on importance only toward the end of the last century. From a cluster of huts among the sand-dunes it sprang to the size of Duluth, to which it bears a resemblance in occupation, point of view, and paucity of historical background. The Argentine is third or fourth among the wheat producing countries of the world, and of later years Bahía Blanca, natural focal point of all the great southern pampas, has outstripped even Buenos Aires as a grain port, to say nothing of the frozen meat from its immense frigorí ficos. Of all the cities of the Argentine it is the most nearly autonomous, for though La Plata remains the provincial capital, the overwhelming commercial importance of Bahía Blanca has given it a self-assertiveness that threatens some day to make it the capital of a newly formed province.

A long vestibuled train carried us on into northern Patagonia, better known now in the Argentine as the territories of Rio Negro, Chubut, and Santa Cruz. I say “us” because I had been joined by a former assistant secretary of agriculture of our own land, recently attached as an adviser to the similar Argentine bureau. He was as profoundly ignorant of Spanish as I of agricultural matters, and our companionship proved of mutual advantage. All that night we rumbled south and west, halting now and then at little pampa stations, if we were to believe the time-table. For we were both snugly ensconced in our berths, the ex-secretary doubly so, since nature had provided him with a more than imposing bulk—until the breaking of a rail over a wash-out bounced us out of them. Sleeping-cars are as customary in the Argentine as in our own land of long distances, and more comfortable. At the height of the season at Mar del Plata as many as a hundred sleepers a night make the journey between that watering-place and Buenos Aires. The normal Argentine railroad gauge is nearly ten inches wider than our own, which is one of the reasons why the dormitorios seem so much more roomy than a Pullman. As in the international expresses of Europe, these have a corridor along one side of the car, from which open two-berth staterooms, with doors that lock and individual toilet facilities. The cross-car berths, one soon discovers, are easier to sleep in than our lengthwise couches, and the dormitorios do away with what Latin-Americans consider, not entirely without reason, our “shockingly indecent” system of forcing strangers, of either sex, to sleep in the same compartment, shielded only by a curtain.

The unconvertible cabins, preferable by night, become mere cells by day, however, and drive most of the passengers to sit in the dining cars. Here the waiters, like the dormitorio porters, are white, with king’s-bed-chamber manners; and the six course meals are moderate in price and usually excellent—except the dessert, the ubiquitous, unfailing, never-varying dulce de membrillo, a stone-hard quince jelly which brings to a sad end virtually every public repast in the Argentine. The trains are not heated; instead there are thick doormats under each seat, and it is a rare traveler in the south between April and October who does not carry with him a blanket bound with a shawl-strap.

The mud-bespattered countrymen at the stations that appeared with the dull autumn daylight seemed to be largely Spanish in origin, some still wearing boínas and other reminders of Europe that looked out of keeping with the soil-caked saddle horses awaiting them behind the railroad buildings. Most of them appeared to have ridden in to buy lottery tickets, or to find which tickets had won in the latest drawing; the raucous-voiced train-boys sold more to these modern gauchos than on the train, especially the list of winning numbers at ten centavos. The thought came to us that even if there are no other reprehensible features to a national lottery, the habit it breeds among workmen of spending their time hoping for a prize a week, instead of pitching in and earning a weekly prize, is at least sufficient to condemn it.

My companion was making the trip for the purpose of studying the soil. A splendid chance he had to do so with most of it under water! The distribution of rain seems to be poorly managed in the Argentine. If the country is not suffering from drought, it is apt to be complaining of floods, or, in the warmer and more fertile north, of the locusts, which sometimes sweep in from the wilderness of the Chaco in such clouds that the project has seriously been considered of erecting an enormous net, supported perhaps by balloons, to stop them.

We brought up late that afternoon in the frontier town of Neuquén, in the national territory of the same name. A garçon corseted into a tuxedo served us dinner, for so they dared call it, in a rambling one-story wooden hotel scattered over the block nearest the station, the only thing worth considering on the bill of fare being “bife” (beefee) or, as the waiter more exactly put it, “asado de vaca,” requiring the teeth of a stone-crusher and the digestion of a ñandú. There is something of the atmosphere of our own frontier towns in those of the Argentine, but not the same studied roughness of character, no display of shooting-irons. The tamest of our western cowboys would probably have shot on sight those prancing, tuxedoed waiters and sent the proprietor to join them for the atrociousness of his meals. Just what would have been his reaction to the beds to which we were afterward assigned—sky blue and pink landscapes so gorgeously painted on foot and headboards that we thought it was dawn every time we woke up—is more than I can guess.

The line which the “Great Southern” hopes soon to push over the Andes to join the railways of Chile in the vicinity of Temuco ran no trains beyond Neuquén on the Sunday which finally dawned in earnest over our picturesque beds, but as pass-holders we had no great difficulty in foisting ourselves upon a young English superintendent westward bound on an inspection tour. In his track automobile we screamed away across the bleak pampas of Patagonia, a hundred and twenty miles and back to Zapala, the vast monotonous plain steadily rising to an elevation of seven thousand feet and bringing us almost to the foot of the great snow-bound range of the Andes forming the Chilean border. The air was cool, dry, and bracing even down at Neuquén; at Zapala the winter-and-mountain cold was so penetrating as to cause us not only to wonder at but to protest volubly against the strange strain of puritanism which had invaded even this distant corner of the Argentine and made it a felony for the frontier shopkeeper to sell anything stronger than beer on Sundays. Forty years ago all this region was an unproductive waste across which roamed half-naked Indians, boleando the ñandúes for their sustenance and living in toldos, easily transportable skin tents like those of certain tribes of Arab Bedouins. To-day we were not even armed. Nowhere was there a remnant of those “Patagones,” people of footprints so large that the southern end of South America was named for them. The young Argentine general who was once assigned the task of clearing northern Patagonia of the nomadic, bandit-like aborigines had done his work with such Spanish thoroughness that the entire tribe was annihilated, their chiefs dying as prisoners on the island of Martín García. The government paid the expenses of this expedition by dividing among the officers (not, be it noted, the soldiers) the hundred million acres of land it added to the national domain, and by selling the rest of it in enormous tracts at such magnificent prices as three cents an acre. To-day intelligent argentinos are figuratively kicking themselves that they did not issue government bonds instead and save this immense territory for the homesteaders who would now gladly settle upon it.

To tell the truth the region did not look like one for which men would die of home-sickness,—dry and bushy, like parts of Texas or northern Mexico, with chaparral and bristling clumps of stunted growth bunched out here and there across a plain that struck one as essentially arid for all the pools of water left by the unprecedented rain. My authoritative companion assured us, however, that it had every sign of great fertility, though requiring irrigation on a large scale, a beginning of which has already been made in the vicinity of the Rio Negro. Yet only a rude and solitary nature surrounded us on all the journey, the same flat monotony, dotted here and there with flocks of sheep guarded by lonely half-Indian or Gallego shepherds, which stretches all the way to the Straits of Magellan.

Flocks of pheasants flew up every little while as we screamed past them; the hoarse cry of the chajás, a species of wild turkey, alternated with the piercing call of the little teru-teru. Only at rare intervals did a scattered flock of sheep or an isolated makeshift rancho with a saddled horse behind it give a human touch to the monotonous desolation. Where the foothills of the Andes began to send us undulating over great smooth ridges, like a bark rocked by a distant storm at sea, there appeared wagon caravans bound for Chile, still days away over the lofty pass ahead. Gradually the great snow-thatched wall of the Andes, endless to the north and south, rose to shut off all the horizon before us, wind-rent clouds dashing themselves to shreds against it. Yet here in the temperate south the snow and ice-fields seemed less striking, much less beautiful than when towering above the sun-flooded tropics.

On our return to Buenos Aires we stopped at an agricultural station near the town of Rio Negro, where irrigation was already showing results. Baled alfalfa lay in quantities at the stations; large vineyards, much as they looked out of place in this landscape-less region, were producing well. There being no passenger train to rescue us, we got telegraphic permission to take the first east-bound freight. Before the delay became unduly monotonous a train rose over the flat horizon and rolled in upon us. We made our way along the thirty-odd cars loaded with sheep to what in our own land would have been a comfortable caboose—and climbed into an ordinary box-car that had all too evidently been recently and often used for the transportation of coal. There was not even an improvised seat in it; trainmen and the sheep care-takers sat on the bare floor with their backs against the sooty wall and bumped along like penniless and unresourceful hoboes. I would have given several pesos to have heard the remarks of an American brakeman who could have looked in upon his Argentine fellows as we jolted across the apparently level plains with the bitter chill of the pampas settling down upon us.

We gladly dropped off at Darwin, where we hired next morning what the argentino calls a “soolkee” and drove to the island of Choele-Choel, with the assistance of a cumbersome government ferry. This thirteen square leagues of fertile loam soil between two branches of the Rio Negro is one of the most prosperous communities in southern Argentine, with half a dozen villages, roads sometimes passable even in the wet season, and noted for the variety of immigration with which it has been peopled. My companion, weary perhaps of talking through an interpreter, was particularly eager to see what remnants remained of a Welsh colony once established here. We drove zigzagging along the wide checkerboard earth roads between endless wire fences behind which many men were plowing with oxen and a few with up-to-date riding gang-plows. Once we paused to talk with one Villanova, political boss of the island, but when my companion brought up the subject nearest his heart, the man instantly showed opposition to the establishment of agricultural schools.

A rural policeman of the Argentine

My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the Argentino calls a “soolky”.

A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and some of its inhabitants

A family of Santiago del Estero

“We have no middle class in the Argentine,” he explained, “and we do not want one. We want only absentee landlords—or at least we have no way of getting rid of them—and laborers, men who actually work and produce. Agricultural schools would give us a class too proud of their schooling to work, and at the same time without property. The distinction between the man who toils and the man who owns is wide in the Argentine, but it would be no improvement to fill in the gulf with a lot of haughty, penniless drones.”

My companion had all but given up hope of using his native tongue directly when there was pointed out to us a farm said to be owned by a Welshman. But only his lanky daughter of sixteen was at home. The ex-secretary addressed her eagerly; here at last he would get first-hand information. The girl shifted from one undeveloped shank to the other, backed away toward the unpainted frame farmhouse from which she had emerged, struggling to answer a question in English, then turning to me, she burst forth, all suggestion of embarrassment gone, in rapid-fire Spanish:

“You see I was born in the Chubut, and English is only my third tongue, for Spanish is my native language and father and mother always speak Welsh at home and I almost never hear English and ...”

My companion bowed his head in resignation and turned our weary horse back across the island toward the ferry.

The chill of autumn gradually disappeared from the air as the fastest train in South America dashed in less than five hours, with only one three-minute stop to change engines, from Buenos Aires to Rosario, two hundred miles northwest of the federal capital. The rich-green immensity of the well cultivated fields bordering the River Paraná were a contrast to the bleak, bare, brown prairies of the south, and the gang-plow, up-to-date methods of our great West were everywhere in evidence. In the seat behind me two men were assuring each other that “the lands of this region are worth ten times those of the interior,” and it was easy to believe them. The rich black loam soil that came to light behind the plows is said to produce two crops of splendid potatoes annually without the use of fertilizer and with no change in crops for twenty years. Though the day was warm and sunny, the cars remained hermetically sealed throughout the journey, for the argentino is true to type in his dread of a breath of fresh air. Scarcely a glimpse of the River Paraná did we catch, though we skirted it all the way to Rosario.

This second city of the republic has been called the Chicago of the Argentine. It is more nearly the Omaha or Atlanta, not merely in size but in the material prosperity, and the appearance and point of view that go with it, which its position as a river port open to large ocean steamers and as the natural outlet of all the fertile provinces of northern Argentine has given it. Like Buenos Aires it has almost no factory chimneys to emphasize its air of activity, which concentrates in the vicinity of the wharves. A stroll through its busy, citified streets is worth the exertion, or, better still, a round of its electric car lines; but one would no more expect to find the picturesque and the legendary past in Rosario than in Newark. Large and prosperous as it has grown, it is not the capital of its province, much to the disgust of its energetic citizens, but is ruled from Santa Fé, a languid little town of several times the age but scarcely one eighth the population of the bustling provincial metropolis. There are advantages in being a capital in the Argentine which we of the north would hardly suspect.

I slipped on up the Paraná to have a look at this capital which the Rosarians so universally tongue-lash. A splendidly fertile, softly rolling, velvety-green country, with dark-red cattle standing in groups here and there to give contrast, was the chief impression left by a journey of several hundred kilometers through the province of Santa Fé. Yet for some reason the city of the same name, though barely a hundred miles north of Rosario, was humidly hot and swarming with flies, its atmosphere that of an ambitionless town of the tropics content to dawdle through life on what the frequent influxes of politicians bring it. Far across the river, which here spreads out into an immense lagoon, lay hazy white on a distant knoll the city of Paraná, capital of the province of Entre Rios, between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, which unite at length to form the Plata.

Another floor-flat, fertile plain, with many ranchos and villages, with “soolkees” jogging along the broad earth roads between wheat and alfalfa fields and pastures dotted with fat cattle and plump sheep until the eyes tired of seeing them, marked the trip westward from Santa Fé. Here, to all appearances, was the best farming land imaginable, though one could easily imagine better farming. Crowds of shaggy yet prosperous-looking countrymen gathered at every station. The alfalfales were still deep-green, though it was already becoming late autumn; golden ears of corn of a size that even Kansas would envy were being husked from the standing stalks and heaped to overflowing into huge trojes, stack-shaped bins made of split palm-trunks or other open-work material.

I came at length to one of the oldest and most famous of Argentine towns, a yellow-white city in a shallow valley, with an almost Oriental aspect, and backed by hills—and hills alone are noteworthy enough to bring a city fame in the Argentine. In fact, Córdoba sits in the only rugged section of the country, except where the Andes begin to climb out of it to the west. Among these ranges, sometimes called, with the exaggeration natural to young nations, the “Argentine Switzerland,” are many summer hotels and colonies, strange as it may seem to go north for the summer in the south temperate zone.

Córdoba, the geographical center of the Argentine Republic, is centuries old, with more traditions, more respect for age, than Buenos Aires, with many reminders of old Spain and of the conservative, time-marked towns of the Andes. In Córdoba it is easy to imagine the atmosphere of the federal capital of a century ago. There is still a considerable “colonial” atmosphere; respect for old customs still survives; age counts, which is rare in the Argentine, a country like our own full of youth and confidence in the future, and the corresponding impatience with the past, with precedent. Peru had already been conquered and settled when Córdoba was made a halfway station between the unimportant river-landing called Buenos Aires and the gold mines of the former Inca Empire, and it was founded by Spanish nobles of a better class than the adventurers who followed Pizarro on his bloody expedition. Many of the families of Córdoba boast themselves descendants of those hidalgos, though to most argentinos ancestry seems as unimportant, compared with the present, as it does to the average American. The Córdobans, like the ancient families of the Andes, look down upon newly won wealth as something infinitely inferior to shabby gentility, though the latter has been refurbished of late years by increasing incomes from the neighboring estates. The Porteño has little sympathy for the Córdoban attitude toward life. He pokes fun at the conservative old city, calling it the “Mecca” of the Argentine because of the pilgrims who come at certain seasons of the year to worship its bejeweled saints; he asserts that its ostensibly “high-brow” people “buy books but do not read them.” The Córdoban retaliates by rating Córdoba, and perhaps Salta, the only “aristocratic” towns in the Argentine, and has kept the old Spanish disdain of commerce, which is naturally a disdain of Buenos Aires.

The conservative old families do not, of course, accept newcomers easily. There is a strong race, as well as class, prejudice. Up to half a century ago no student was admitted to the university unless he could show irrefutable proof of “pure” blood, that is, of unbroken European ancestry. That rule might be in force to this day but for the strong hand of the federal government. The famous university, founded in 1605 by the Jesuits, and ranking with that of Lima as the oldest in America, is outwardly an inconspicuous two-story building, though there are artistic old paintings and cedar-of-Tucumán carvings inside that are worth seeing. The students who attend it are, however, by no means unobtrusive, though they do not seem to give quite such exclusive attention to the color of their gloves and the brand of their perfumes as do their prototypes in the federal capital. It is natural, too, that such a community should retain an air of piety. Its ancient moss-grown cathedral, likewise of Jesuit construction, with a far-famed tower, is but one of some thirty churches in a town of a scant thirty thousand inhabitants. Priests and monks give it by their number and conspicuousness an atmosphere quite unlike Buenos Aires, with its scarcely noticeable low Grecian cathedral, its lack of church towers, and its rare priests. In Córdoba there are even beggar monks who make regular tours of the province, reminiscent of medieval Spain. The church and its functionaries own many fine estancias, for pilgrims have always come in numbers, and society is pious to the point of fanaticism. If one may believe the Porteño, the conservatism and fanaticism of Córdoba would be worse than it is had not the central government sent to the university a number of German Protestant professors, who have had some influence on the community, not so much in Germanizing as in breaking down ancient prejudices.

Among the amusing old customs that remain are some that lend a touch of the picturesque to offset a certain tendency toward the modern. Cows are still driven through the streets, attended by their calves, and are milked before each client’s door; the conservative Córdoban will have none of this new-fangled notion of having his milk brought in bottles, in which there may be a percentage of water. Here there is still the weekly band concert and plaza promenade, with the two sexes marching in opposite directions; here the duenna is in her glory and prospective husbands whisper their assertions through iron-grilled windows. The gente del pueblo, or rank-and-file citizens, nearly all with a considerable proportion of that Indian blood almost unknown in Buenos Aires, live in adobe thatched houses in the outskirts and have the appearance, as well as repute, of little industry, with the Andean tendency to work only a few days a week since foreign industry has raised their wages to a point where frequent vacations are possible. Cactus and donkeys add a suggestion of Andean aridity in the outskirt section, over which floats now and then a subtle breath of the tropics.

Córdoba in its shallow valley, veiled by thick banks of white mist, was more beautiful on the morning I left than when more plainly seen. As our train rose above it to the vast level pampa the city disappeared, but all along the western horizon lay its famous mountains, a long ridge, saw-like in places, turning indigo blue when the sun went down on a brilliant day. On the other side of the train still lay the monotonous, flat, low Argentine pampa, without hedges, ditches, almost without trees, the roads mere wide spaces reserved for travel. The law requires that federal roads be fifty meters broad, but in this land of unlimited space and little stone no law can keep them from being impassable sloughs in the rainy season and rivers of dust in the dry. Even here were many enormous estancias, single estates of half a million acres, which the train took hours to cross, though they are small compared with some in the frontier country of the south. Here are estancieros who have the impression that the sun rises and sets on their property—which is not without its influence on their characters and especially on those of their children. In the “good old days,” which were not so long ago in the Argentine, persons with money, political influence, or a military record could acquire vast tracts of territory at trifling cost, and up to the present generation these landed proprietors, among them most of the old families of Córdoba, were virtually monarchs of all they surveyed. Now the government, once so prodigal with its land, is beginning to see the error of its ways, and is forming the habit of talking in terms of square kilometers instead of square leagues, as well as favoring bona fide settlers, though it still does not require those who buy public lands at a song to settle upon and improve them.

Perhaps once each half hour did a more pretentious estancia house, surrounded by its thin grove of precious eucalyptus, break the monotony of flat plain and makeshift ranchos. It is the scarcity of trees no doubt that makes birds so rare in the Argentine. The two-compartment, oven-shaped mud nests of the hornero on the crosspieces of the telegraph poles were almost the only signs of them, except of course the occasional ñandúes loping away across the pampa. The more and more open-work reed shacks began to suggest almost perpetual summer. Then all at once I ceased feeling the increasing heat, suddenly put down my window, and a moment later was hurrying into a sweater. For a pampero had blown up from the south, and seemed bent on penetrating to the marrow of my bones.

When I peered out of my sleeping-car cabin next morning, a considerable change of landscape met the eye. The “rápido” was crawling into Santiago del Estero, and I seemed to have been transported overnight from the rich green fields of the Paraná back to the dreary Andes, or, more exactly, to the coastlands of Peru or Bolivia. Founded in the middle of the sixteenth century, on the bank of a river that becomes salty a little farther on, and forms in the rainy season large esteros, or brackish backwaters and lagoons, “St. James of the Swamp” still suffers intensely for lack of water. It is unfortunate that nature does not divide her rains more evenly in the Argentine. Farther south only the tops of the fence posts were protruding from the flood in some places; here the country seemed to be habitually dying of thirst.

The main line of the “Central Argentine” does not run into Santiago, but operates a little branch from La Banda (“Across the River”), because of the treachery of the wide, shifty, sandy stream on which it lies. To-day the railroad has a great iron bridge some two miles long, successor to the several less hardy ones, the ruins of which may be seen just protruding from the sandy bed along the way. The company asserts that it spends more to keep up its road into Santiago than it gets back from that city in traffic, but its concession requires it to maintain contact with what is reputed the most “native” capital of province still left in the Argentine. Center of what is said to be the least fertile section of the country, it remains, for a time at least, to the part-Indian race which the South American calls native, the ambitionless cholo or mestizo, with his Mohammedan indifference to the future, his inertia before modern progress. In other words, Santiago is an example of how immigration is driving the native town as it is the native individual into the most distant and poorest corners of the Argentine.

The town is built of crude bricks or baked mud, the only material available, and except in the center it is a disintegrated collection of huts with ugly high fronts and the air of never having reached maturity in growth, though they have long since in age. It has few paved streets and no street-cars, though it is overrun by a veritable plague of those noisy, impudent hackmen who swarm in rural and provincial Argentine and over whom the police seem to have neither influence nor authority. A dead-dry, yellow prairie grass spreads wherever the ground is not frankly sterile; chaparral and other desert brush grows even within the town. Its thatched ranchos of reeds, to be found anywhere a few blocks back of the central plaza, are overrun with goats, pigs, cur dogs, and naked children, like the most backward towns of the Andes. Here are to be found the choclo, locro, chicha, and other corn products common to the Andean cuisine, the same thin sheets of sun-dried beef, the swarming gente del pueblo so common to Peru and Ecuador, so unknown in Buenos Aires. The popular speech is again the Quichua of the Incas, Santiago being the only Argentine town of any size where it has survived, though it is a Quichua as different from that of Cuzco as the Italian of Florence is from that of Naples. Most of the children and many of the adults go barefooted, a rare custom in the Argentine; virtually all citizens have the incorrigible Latin-American habit of stopping all talk to gaze open-mouthed at a passing stranger, entire groups of men on the street corners turning their heads to stare after him until one feels genuine misgiving lest they permanently dislocate their ostrich necks.

There are reminders, too, of the gypsy section of Granada or Seville, hints of Luxor or Assuan in Upper Egypt, as well as of the somnolent towns in the half-tropical valleys of the Andes. The thatched mud huts are surrounded with cactus hedges on which the family wash hangs drying; everything is coated with the fine white dust of the unpaved streets, through which the half-Indian women wade almost ankle deep, their slattern skirts sweeping it into clouds behind them. Now and then there passes one of these chola females leading through the dust-river a donkey bestridden by a girl of the same race and drawing by two ropes tied to knobs in its ends a rolling barrel of water, the chocolate-colored river water on which the town seems chiefly to subsist. A dry, cracked soil under an ardent sun, thin animals eating greedily at poor tufts of scanty vegetation, cactus used as field fences as well as inclosing the miserable ranchos, cactus with twisted trunks that look like enormous snakes about to strike, immense cactus candelabras of ten or fifteen branches, a few poor chickens picking at the sterile soil about the ranchos by day and roosting by night in the rare scraggly trees, scores of hungry-looking goats browsing on nothing, yet somehow keeping energy enough to gambol about a scene usually devoid of any form of unnecessary activity, a few almost leafless scrub trees on which hang rags of raw meat sun-drying into charqui, or, as they call it in southeastern South America, tasajo—these make up the background of almost any picture of Santiago. Against this stand out in slight relief bronzed cholos loafing in the shade of the huts, pigs and children disputing the same dreary playgrounds, men shirtless or in shirt sleeves, with rather lifeless, inexpressive brown features, women dressed in shapeless thin cotton gowns of brilliant colors—apple-green, pink, shrieking red—their rarely washed faces surmounted by masses of coarse, thick, straight black hair knotted carelessly together at the neck, little girls carrying naked babies almost as large as themselves, nearly all holding in one hand the dried-gourd bowl of mate heated over a fagot fire in the open air, sucking it eagerly yet languidly through the straw-shaped metal bombilla. A completely naked gamin of five gallops about astride a stick, his slightly older and no more expensively attired brother doing the like on a scrubby horse without saddle or bridle, both scattering the pigs, dogs, and chickens at every turn. From the hut doors or the midst of such families seated al fresco and taking their mate from a single bowl that circulates round and round the group come languid calls of “Ché Maria!” “Ché compadre!” “Ché Gringa!” “Ché” is the popular nickname of affection or familiarity in southern South America, corresponding roughly to our once widespread pseudonym “kid.”

I had the customary santiagueño pleasure of rising at an unearthly hour to catch the morning train to La Banda, only to find there that the “mixed” daily from Buenos Aires into the sugar-fields of the far north was seven hours late. Over the way stood a hotel poetically named “El Dia de Nosotros,” but that day was evidently past, for the place was irrevocably closed, and it was only by a streak of luck that long after my customary breakfast hour I got from an uninviting street stand a cup of what purported to be black coffee. During the delay I fell into conversation with two young Austrians who had been all the way up to Salta in quest of fortune. The best chance for work they had found was at cutting sugar-cane at terms under which no one but the most expert could earn more than two pesos a day. Much as it resembles our own land in some ways, the Argentine does not give one the impression of being any such Eldorado for the newcomer whose stock in trade consists solely of two brawny arms.

The mixto crawled in at last, covered with a thick blanket of fine dust. At the station of Araoz, on the boundary line between the provinces of Santiago and Tucumán, the sterile, bushy country suddenly gave way to sugar-cane, vast fields, veritable prairies of cane, not the little patches of light-green that dot and decorate many an Andean landscape, but prosaic, heavily productive stretches as unromantic as Iowa cornfields, spreading as far as the eye could see in any direction. Cutting had begun, for it was late April, and all the way to Tucumán the dull, sullen rumble of the massive rollers was as incessant as the pungent smell of molasses in the air, while everywhere great brick stacks rose from the flat green landscape, belching forth their heavy clouds of smoke on the hazy, humid atmosphere.

Tucumán, my farthest north in the Argentine, in a latitude similar to that of southern Florida, was once under the Inca, though the casual observer would scarcely suspect of any such past this bustling modern Argentine town and capital of the smallest yet most prosperous province of the republic. It is a town that lives, breathes, and dreams sugar, accepting proudly the national nickname of the “City of Sugar.” A checkerboard place, some of its wide streets paved with wooden blocks, its houses of the old Spanish one-story style, yet often seventy or eighty meters deep, with two flowery patios hidden away behind the bare, though gaily smeared, façades, it has mildly the “feel” of the tropics intermingled with its considerable modern activity. Electric tramways and lights are very much in evidence, yet horsemen resembling those of the Andean wilds may be seen riding along under the trolley wires. In the central Plaza de la Independencia are orange-trees laden with ripe fruit, pepper-trees, palms, and cactus, not to mention a highly unsuccessful marble statue of Liberty, holding in her hands the links of her broken chains as if they were considerably too hot for comfort. About this never-failing civic focus are the government buildings, the cathedral, the bishop’s palace, and several pretentious clubs, though the entire circuit brings to view no architecture of interest. In one of several other squares there is a statue of Belgrano, who defeated the Spaniards in this vicinity in 1812 with the aid of “Our Lady of Mercies,” whom the general rewarded by appointing her a generalísimo of his armies. Near the central plaza, surrounded with an almost religious atmosphere, is Independence Hall, in which was signed what amounts to Argentine’s Declaration of Independence. It is a little adobe structure, long and low, like many of the poor men’s ranchos scattered about the pampas, carefully whitewashed, with a restored wooden roof and other improvements to make it look new and unnatural, after the approved Latin-American style of disguising what it is feared may be taken for the commonplace. All this is covered by a large modern concrete building in charge of a chinita, who is theoretically always on hand to admit visitors who desire to see the two good bronze reliefs, the medals, the portraits of the signers of the declaration, to sit down in the century-old presidential chair long enough for a snapshot, and to add their autographs to the register locked away in the former presidential desk, in approved tourist fashion. From Tucumán one can make out the dim blue outline of the lower Andes to the west, and in clear sunny weather the snow peaks of Bolivia stand out distinctly to the north. Indeed, it is within the district embracing Tucumán and Santiago del Estero that Argentine life begins to shade imperceptibly into the Bolivian or Andean.

Virtually the entire province of Tucumán is covered with sugar-cane and orange groves. The rivalry between these two products has been acute for decades, now one, now the other usurping the center of the stage. Toward the end of the last century the northern part of the republic “went sugar crazy” and burned whole forests of orange-trees in order to plant cane. The result was a year of overproduction, the only period in which the Argentine exported sugar, though she should easily be able to supply half South America. On the contrary she habitually imports sugar, her own in many cases, for the crude sugar shipped to Europe is often the very sugar which was served in tissue-wrapped lumps in nearly every restaurant and lechería of Buenos Aires long before that sanitary provision was thought of in the United States. But then, so does the Argentine import garlic, and onions, peppers, garbanzos (the Spanish chickpeas of which she is still so fond), cheese, and millions of “fresh” eggs, not only from Uruguay across the river but from Spain and Portugal across the sea, though all these commodities might easily be produced at home. Sugar pays what we would consider a heavy internal duty, which is reputed to be one of the causes why there are so few national refineries. In her one year of overproduction Tucumán province gave the country nearly twice the sugar it could consume. The terrified planters banded together to build up the export trade, got a bounty from the federal government, which was later forbidden by the Brussels convention, and forced the provincial government to pass a law limiting sugar plantations. In carrying this out the tucumanos, who had burned forests of orange-trees a few years before to plant cane, now burned square leagues of cane-fields that were producing too generously. The government indemnified the men who fired their fields and furnished them free seeds of corn, wheat, and barley with which to replant them. But in time the pendulum swung back again and to-day the province has little interest in anything but sugar.

Tucumán retains none of the primitive methods by which cane is turned into brown lumps of panela or chancaca on the little plantations scattered through the Andes. Some sixty immense engenios grind incessantly during the rather short but exceedingly busy season. The capacity of many of these mills is large, though they work less than those of Cuba. These, and the often enormous estates about them, are in most cases owned by English or other foreign firms, the American being most conspicuous by his absence. Not only are we unrepresented in ownership but in the machinery used, which is with rare exceptions British, French, Belgian, and German, for the argentino seems to have an instinct which draws him toward Europe and causes him to avoid all unnecessary contact with what he calls the “North American.” It is not that he fears the “Collosus of the North,” like so many of the smaller, bad-boy republics nearer the Gulf of Mexico, rather is he firmly convinced that his country is as powerful and self-sufficient as our own, but he is inclined by temperament and custom to turn his eyes eastward rather than northward.

In this busy season of the Argentine autumn and winter Tucumán province is a hive of activity. Thousands of workmen of many races are scattered among the horseman-high plants which stretch to the horizon in every direction, slashing off the canes at the ground, clearing them of leaves and useless top with a few quick swings of the machete, and tossing them with graceful easy gesture upon piles often several meters away. Along the wide and soft dirt roads which cut into squares the dense jungles of cane, there is a constant stream of cumbersome two-wheeled carts, usually drawn by five mules, the meztizo driver in his ragged garments and soiled, broad-brimmed hat astride the off hind animal, as they strain toward the points of concentration. There the load is weighed and lifted in a single bundle by huge cranes which are the only American contribution to the average estate, and dropped into the cars of the private railroads that crisscross all the province, or directly into the carriers that feed the three sets of mammoth inexorable rollers. The bagasa left over from the crushing is burned at once in the mill engines, along with the wood brought in from constantly increasing distances; the mosta, or saccharine residue so poor and dirty that it will not produce even the lowest of the three grades of unrefined sugar, is turned into alcohol. Every important factory has a village clustered about it, a community complete from bakers to priest. Field workers have an unalienable right to the two finest canes they cut or load during the day, and at dusk long broken lines of them may be seen returning from the fields carrying their poles over one shoulder, like homeward bound fishermen, or seated on the ground, machete in hand, peeling the cane and cutting it into sections, to thrust these in their mouths, crush and suck them, and spit them out upon the earth about them.

No traveler with a bit of time to spare should leave the Argentine without visiting her chief “holy place,” presided over by La Virgen de Luján. If we are to believe all we are told, it is this patron saint who has made the Argentine the prosperous, happy land it is to-day. To her groups of pious women, headed by the archbishop, made pilgrimage from Buenos Aires when the bill of the new socialist deputies threatened to become a divorce law; to her the country turns when it gets too much, or too little, rain; here the Irish-Argentinos gather en masse on St. Patrick’s day.

Genuine pilgrims are expected to fast on the day they visit Luján. We—for a friend made the journey with me—came nearly carrying out this requirement in spite of ourselves, having missed the train we planned to take and unwisely set out on foot without waiting for the next. For once outside the city limits, it is a long way from Buenos Aires to the next shop or restaurant. Luján is something more than forty miles west of the capital, the usual “boliche” town of the pampas and a slough of mud in this autumn season, the unfinished dull-red brick “basilica” bulking high above it and visible many miles away. The legend, which still finds a surprisingly large number of believers in the Argentine, runs that in the time of the Spanish dominion a community of Spanish monks set out with great ceremony to transport a statue of the Virgin from Buenos Aires to Peru. Arrived at the hamlet of Luján, the cart in which it was being carried stopped. Nothing could induce it to move on. No doubt it was the rainy season and there was excellent reason for its immovability, but the good monks concluded that the Virgin was expressing a desire to remain where she was, and her wishes were respected. A small chapel was erected and her cult perpetuated. When immigration increased and swarms of devout Italians, not to mention the Spanish and Irish, began to settle in the vicinity and make frequent pilgrimages to the shrine, the bishop in charge took it as an indication that the powers of a better world wished the Virgin to be housed in a building befitting her increasing popularity. He undertook the erection, from popular subscriptions, of a “Gothic cathedral” which should be the most imposing in the Argentine, though this, to be sure, is not saying much. It was planned to spend six million pesos, half of which are already gone, and as soon as the walls had been raised the bishop insisted on opening the building, which perhaps is why there is so little suggestion of Gothic about the bare brick, towerless, façade-less, on the whole dismal structure.

Though we might be willing to fast, when there was no choice in the matter, not all the patron saints on the globe could have forced us to wallow through the mile or more of black mud between the station and the “basilica.” For that matter, we noted that even the pious pilgrims who had arrived with us in their gleaming patent-leather shoes climbed unhesitatingly into the comfortable, if tiny, horsecar, and that not one of them gave a suggestion of dropping off to finish the journey on his knees, or even on foot. We were no less astounded, if secretly more pleased, to find that one of the rascals keeping the restaurants tucked away among the many santerías, shops in which are sold tin “saints” which los fieles may carry home to perform their cures by hand, was willing to jeopardize our future salvation by providing us, before we had consummated the object of every visit to Luján, with as much of a repast as one learns to hope for in an Argentine “boliche” town.

Inside the unfinished but already richly decorated “basilica” the curved-stone back of the altar and the stairway rising above it was already carved with the names of those who credited the Virgin with curing them of incurable ailments. There were other less conspicuous places for similar testimonials from those with less mesmerism over the root of evil. About the altar were gathered groups of pilgrims engaged in the preliminary formalities of the faithful who come seeking aid. Peasants still wearing the garb of Lombardy or Piedmont, and no doubt come to ask the Virgin for a little less rain and a better price for their corn, that they might buy the coveted piece of land next their own or send more money to the old people they had left behind in Italy, mingled with richly garbed Porteñas who were praying perhaps for motherhood or the welfare of a lover.

“But where is the statue?” asked my impious companion of a young priest who was marching back and forth committing to memory some password to heaven.

“Why—er,” gasped the startled ecclesiastic, “do you mean the Blessed Virgin?”

“Yes,” returned my companion, carelessly.

“Follow those broad curving stairs and you will find our Blessed Lady of Luján in that little room above the altar,” replied the horrified youth, crossing himself fervently.

Above we found a single worshipper, a working woman dressed in the most nearly whole and spotless gown she possessed, kneeling on the marble floor, to which she bowed her forehead now and then, her eyes fixed on a doll some two feet high overdressed in heavy gilded robes and covered with bracelets, necklaces and girdles of false pearls and diamonds—for the real ones, worth a king’s ransom, are deposited in a safety vault in Buenos Aires and are used only on the anniversary of the Virgin’s halt in Luján. Back of the woman her son of five was climbing high up the iron grill surrounding the chapel, in his own particular effort to reach heaven. I lifted him down before he broke his neck, whereupon he sidled over to the lunch-basket the pair had brought with them and, keeping a weather eye on his devout parent, stealthily drew out a quart bottle of wine wrapped in a newspaper. Setting his teeth in the protruding cork, he tugged at it for some time, like a puppy at a root, drew it at last, and with an eye still on his mother, deep in her communing with the Virgin, gulped down nearly half a liter, re-corked the bottle, and slipped it back into its place.

On the way down we halted to speak with a well-dressed warden, who assured us that he had personally known of “thousands of supernatural cures” performed by the Virgin of Luján.

“Why,” he cried, growing more specific, “I have known many rich ladies to come out here from Buenos Aires on crutches, make a promise to our Blessed Virgin and go back home and—and by and by they would send out the crutches as proof of being cured, and perhaps a diamond necklace to show their gratitude to Our Lady. There is no ailment that Our Lady cannot cure.”

“Curious,” I mused, “but as I came in I noticed just outside the gates four beggars,—a blind woman, a one-legged man, a man without legs, and a paralytic.”

“Ah, esa gente! That class of people!” cried the warden, with a world of disgust in his voice and a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders.

CHAPTER IV
OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE

It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me outside the Argentine and beyond the jurisdiction of our overworked consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my exertions in running errands and eluding Porteño prices, the day seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The “International,” of the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” leaves the capital three times a week on what purports to be a trip clear across the continent. In spirit its assertion is truthful, for though the “International” itself halts where the Argentine begins to tilt up into the Andes, other trains connect with it and one can, with good luck and ample wealth, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific, thirty-six hours after bidding the Porteños farewell.

On a crisp May morning I set out westward from “B.A.,” lying featureless and yellow-white in the brilliant early-winter sunshine, not a church spire, scarcely a factory chimney, though many unsightly American windmills, rising above its monotonous level. The heavy “limited” train made scarcely half a dozen stops all day, though no extraordinary speed. At the rare stations a few passengers hastened to enter or leave the cars; between them trees and windmills rose or receded hull-down over the horizon of the dreary pampas. Outside each uninspiring town was an ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy islands. Many mud houses were half under water, their thatched roofs and adobe walls turned into velvety green lawns; hay-stacks had grown verdant with sprouting grass; several pairs of horses dragging along the churned roads a load of baled alfalfa was one of the rare signs of activity. Even the ñandúes seemed to have fled to some modern Ararat.

A woman of Córdoba, mate bowl in hand

Even a lady would not look unladylike in the bombachas of southeastern South America

The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with snow

A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of May

Farther west the country was somewhat drier, or at least more often above water. Here the vast pampa was divided by wire fences, producing the illusion of an immense cobweb, broken only rarely by a dense blue grove of eucalyptus trees planted about the central house of an enormous estancia, estates in most cases too large for the economic health of the country. Up to recent years the great mistake of the Argentine government was to grant mammoth tracts of land to men who quickly became so wealthy that they moved to private palaces in the capital, leaving little or nothing for the homesteads of what might be a host of productive freehold farmers. The railway company is striving to get these huge estates broken up, encouraging colonization by offering prizes for the best crops along its lines, as well as special inducements of transportation. For much of the region through which the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” runs is so thinly populated that, as in some of our western states, the common carrier is forced to help produce something to carry. But the big landed proprietors have a Spanish pride in the size of their holdings, and with it an abhorrence not only of manual labor but even of living on their estates, from which the income is large enough for their comfort under the poorest systems of farming, or mere grazing, and it is not easy to induce them to sell even those portions lying wholly idle. The company has various ways of combatting this attitude. The most common is to build stations only where wealthy estancieros donate not merely the land needed for immediate use, but room for future railroad development and sometimes for the building of a village and the beginning of more intensive agriculture about it.

A few of these have developed into true frontier towns, with enormously wide mud streets and electric lights, stretching far out into the country, as if the inhabitants expected to wake up any morning and find the place trebled in population. They were like a country without a history,—prosperous, contented—and uninteresting. There being almost no stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it was not strange that the majority even of town houses were made of the only material at hand, mud, as the Esquimaux build of snow and ice; yet the most dismal of these structures were by no means the comfortless dens of the Indians and cholos of the Andes. It was Sunday, and especially on that day is it the custom in the smaller provincial towns to hacer el corso, to parade back and forth, at the station at train-time. Groups of comely girls, well dressed for such districts, powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair, their arms interlocked, were not content to display their charms to their rustic fellow-townsmen outside the station barriers, but invaded the platforms and strolled from end to end of the train as long as it remained. As attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant groups of admirers in South America, the latter increased the platform throng to a point where it was a lucky traveler who could find room to descend and make his way across it.

For long distances there were almost no signs of animate life except occasional flocks of ñandúes cantering away like awkward schoolgirls. About every boliche, country store and liquor shop, were groups of shaggy pampa ponies and their no less shaggy riders, the animals prevented from deserting their owners by rawhide thongs binding their front feet together. Bombachas, the bloomer-like nether garments of the pampas, were much in evidence among these modern gauchos. A few of these, no doubt, were independent farmers; the majority were plainly hired men whose greatest likeness to the hardy part-Indian cowboys of a generation ago is the ability to absorb some five pounds of meat a day, washing it down with copious draughts of boiling mate. Vegetables are as little grown in the Argentine as in most of South America, and the employees, only the mayordomos and the pen-driving class missing, who gather daily about the asado provided by the estanciero, still live almost entirely on meat, with occasionally a few hardtack galletas from these pampa stores. Boys of seven or eight, with true gaucho blood in their veins, who sat their horses as if they were part of them, galloped about some of these smaller towns, boleando cats and dogs with astonishing skill. At the more important crossings an old man or woman, sometimes a little girl, stood waving as solemnly as if the whole future of the railroad depended upon them the black-and-yellow flag that means “all safe” to Argentine trainmen. Country policemen were almost numerous, riding along the miserable roads or dismounted at the stations, covered with dust or mud and mingling with the hardy, independent countrymen. The rural Argentine police still have a far from enviable reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style of argentino as they once did over the bold but unsophisticated gaucho of the “Martín Fierro” type. Yet on the whole they were not a body of men to inspire confidence. One felt at a glance that, far from trusting to their protection, it would be better to have someone else along in the more lonely sections of the country to protect one from the police.

Mendoza, metropolis of western Argentine and capital of the province of the same name, lies at the very base of the Andes, six hundred miles inland from Buenos Aires and barely one fourth as far from the Pacific, though with the mighty Andean wall intervening. Built on plentiful flat ground in what is sometimes called the “Argentine California,” the city is laid out in wide checkerboard streets, some of them shaded by rows of magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with ditches made of mosaics of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy of man’s attention, and though the town is not tropical, banana, acacia, and mulberry trees bathe their feet in these intermittent streams and take on an extraordinary vigor. The central section has a number of modern business buildings, but the dwellings are nearly all still in the old Spanish style, often large houses, but capacious chiefly in depth, so that one only half suspects the several flowery patios they inclose. Few buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations, with columned façades and corredores paved with colored marble dalles, are made of mud baked with straw and lime. For Mendoza still remembers the days, sixty years ago, when an earthquake destroyed the entire town, burying nearly the whole population of ten thousand in the ruins. Nothing remains now of the old town except the ruins of a church or two that are preserved as historical souvenirs and warnings against high buildings, mere masses of bricks standing like monoliths on the summits of walls that seem ever ready to fall down and on which a bush or a plant has here and there taken root; yet the mendocinos are only beginning to put their faith in reinforced concrete. Many of the houses are smeared pink, saffron, blue, or other bright color, and when it rains the mud roofs run down over the façades, streaking the colors or washing them out to a leprous gray.

Being almost entirely a one-story town, and retaining the Moorish style of architecture, even the hotels of Mendoza have no windows on the streets, the only openings to the rooms being the door on the patio, so that the guest who needs a bit of light must disclose to servants and fellow-clients all his domestic activities; and to reach the bathroom, if there is one, means parading the entire length of the courtyard. Sidewalk cafés are thronged even on “winter” evenings; as elsewhere in the Argentine, every workingman’s restaurant has its cancha de bochas, a kind of earth-floored bowling-alley native to rural Italy. There are electric street-cars, and the electric lights, outdoors and in, outdo our own in size and brilliancy. While the English own the important Argentine railroads, Germans hold most of the concessions for electric light and power in the provincial towns, and Mendoza is no exception to this rule.

The modern argentino is not only a transplanted European, but in most cases has come over within the past century. Only Caucasian immigration is welcome, no negroes and none of the yellow races being admitted. As in Buenos Aires, there is in the capital of each province an immigration bureau, with attendants speaking the principal tongues of Europe, which strives to place the newcomer to his and the country’s advantage. Thus there is a decidedly European atmosphere even in towns as far back in the depths of America as Mendoza, one that all but obliterates the purely American aspect. The city retains a suggestion of Spanish colonial days, but the native bombachas are no more familiar sights than the Basque cap of the Pyrenees and the hemp-sole sandals, the short blouse with wide sash of contrasting color, and the clean-shaven features of the hardy Spanish peasant and arriero.

Like several of the more important cities far distant from the federal capital, Mendoza enjoys a certain local autonomy, though the prevailing political party in the Argentine advocates a strongly centralized government more nearly like that of France than that in the United States. The province prints its own small money, legal tender only within its limits, for the national currency not only becomes scarcer but more and more ragged and illegible in ratio to the distance from Buenos Aires. A not entirely unjustified fear of revolution, too, causes the province to maintain a large police force, for the Argentine has nothing like our National Guard. It is easy for the federal government, often looking for just such a chance, to intervene at the first suggestion of trouble in a province, and as such intervention means a suspended governor, a legislature forced out of office, and the loss of nearly all political patronage, the provincial authorities find it to their advantage to have a dependable police force. Persistent rumor has it that the police of Mendoza, however, are far from perfect, that they lose few opportunities to force bribes from, and otherwise tyrannize over, the population. Many fines may legally be imposed and collected directly by the police, and the story runs that it is particularly unfortunate to attract their attention toward the end of the month. They are then apt to be penniless, and are given to wandering the streets after dark, seeking whom they may run in and threaten to lock up if he does not at once pay the “fine” then and there levied by the police. If the victim asks for a receipt, rumor adds, he is instantly clapped into jail, or rather, is sent to stand all night or sit down in mud in the prison yard. Even important citizens of Mendoza hesitate to go out alone after dark at the end of the month.

I spent May twenty-fifth, the Argentine Independence Day, in Mendoza. An official salute woke the town at sunrise, to find itself already fluttering with flags, the blue-and-white Argentine banner predominating, but with many others, the yellow-and-red of Spain in particular—and one lone Stars and Stripes, in front of a sewing-machine agency. The uninformed stranger might have suspected that there is more patriotism to the square yard in the Argentine than in any other land. Had he inquired a bit, however, he would have learned that the law requires all inhabitants—not merely citizens, be it noted—to fly the national flag on May 25 and July 9, as it requires all men to uncover when the national anthem is played, and all school children to learn by rote certain chauvinistic platitudes. Nor should the fact be overlooked that the “Veinticinco de Mayo”—for which Argentine towns, streets, shops, cafés, and even dogs are named—is perilously near the end of the month.

In the morning everyone went to church, from white-haired generals lop-shouldered with the weight of the gleaming hardware across their chests to newly-rich Spaniards who still wore shoes with less ease than they would have cloth alpargatas. Scores of police, dozens of firemen, still wearing their hats or helmets, as is the custom throughout South America, lined the aisles from entrance to altar. When all the élite and high government officials had gathered, the archbishop himself preached a sermon founded on the not wholly unique assertion that politicians seek government places for their own good rather than for that of the governed, ending with the warning that the Argentine was sliding pellmell to perdition because the teaching of the Catholic religion is not permitted in the public schools. The governor of the province lent an attentive ear throughout this harangue, and watched the service with attentive Latin-American politeness; but it was noticeable that he did not show enthusiasm, and that no ceremony was included that required kneeling or crossing oneself on the part of the congregation, for Argentine government officials are often noted for their anticlerical attitude. There was an entirely different atmosphere here than at the Te Deum I had attended on Colombia’s Independence Day two years before in cloistered Bogotá.

The municipal band met us outside the cathedral and led the parade of police and firemen—marching like men long accustomed to drilling—of citizens and ecclesiastics, the archbishop, still in his purple, surrounded by a guard of honor with drawn bayonets. The procession broke up at the entrance to the Parque del Oeste, said to be the largest city park in South America. Miniature trains, astride which human beings look gigantic, carried those who did not care to walk, or hire other transportation, out to this extensive civic improvement, spreading over all the landscape at the base of the Andes to the west of the city. The crowning feature of this enormous new park, with an artificial lake nearly a mile long, concrete grandstands, and broad shaded avenues, is a solid rock rising from the plain on which the city is built, the first outpost of the Andes that bulk into the heavens close behind it. The entire top of this hill, reached by a roadway cut in a complete circuit of it, has been blasted off, and on this great platform has been reared a gigantic creation of granite and bronze called “The Armies of the Andes.” It commemorates the passage of the Andes by San Martín’s troops early in the last century to free Chile from Spanish rule, one of the most heroic expeditions in American history,—a badly equipped, half starved force struggling through snow-blocked passes on what seemed then an almost quixotic mission. Yet the conception and execution of the monument, magnificent in proportions, rarely surpassed in dignity, is worthy of its subject. Behind and above the splendid equestrian statue of San Martín are his officers and the army of liberation, ranging all the way from low relief to detached figures, the whole surmounted by an enormous winged victory, while around the monument hover huge bronze condors. All this, be it noted, was planned and carried out by a provincial town of fifty thousand inhabitants. Of the view to be had from it, on one side the plains of the Argentine, flat as a motionless sea, on the other this same plain, bursting suddenly into mountains, which climb in more and more jagged formation to the snow-clad summits of the Andes almost sheer overhead, mere words are but weak symbols to describe.

Meanwhile the excellent municipal band had been playing all the afternoon in a kiosk nearer the park entrance. Soon after noonday we low-caste promenaders on foot had begun to gather about it; then a few poor public vehicles took to ambling around it; better and better carriages appeared, with coachmen in high hats and livery; finally private automobiles, large and gleamingly new, joined the now crowded cortège. Pedestrians had become too many for free movement; the carriages and automobiles circled in unbroken procession farther and farther out on the horseshoe-shaped drive, until each heard only occasional snatches of the music as they passed near it. A few silk-clad ladies and their perfumed escorts deigned to descend and stroll a bit. Policemen on magnificent horses, white plumes waving from their helmets, directed the traffic with princely gestures. By dusk all Mendoza was there, every class of society from the proud hidalgo descendent of the conquistadores to the millionaire Spaniard who came out forty years ago with his worldly possessions in a cardboard suitcase, and who now took care to avoid the old Spanish match-seller who was his boon companion on that memorable voyage. Vendors, hawkers and fakers, announcing their wares as loudly as they dared without arousing the wrath of the haughty army officer, master of ceremonies, who would presently vent his spleen upon those who failed to snatch off their hats at the first note of the national anthem, mingled with honest European workmen in boínas and alpargatas and sun-faded shirts, enjoying a rare day of recreation in the life-time of toil which they naïvely consider their natural lot. Though wine flows as freely in Mendoza as in Italy, not a suggestion of drunkenness did I see during the day.

As evening advanced, the crowd became more and more silk-hatted in looks and temperament, a better bred, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, yet also more blasé throng than similar gatherings over the Andes. The bony, ungraceful women numerous in northern countries were rare, the plump type not only of Mendoza but of all the Argentine most in evidence being physically attractive in spite of overdress and enameled faces. Soon after full darkness had fallen some of the most regal equipages fell out of the procession by failing to turn the outside corner of the drive, and wended their way homeward. The better class of hired vehicles gradually followed their example; the public hacks, whose occupants were having perhaps their one spree of the year, at last got tardy, regretful orders to turn townward, until the place was left again to the foot-going classes, many of the hawkers, fakers and vendors still wandering among them, emitting rather helpless yelps in a last effort to be rid of what remained of their wares. There came a hurried last number by the band, cut unseemly short as the players dropped out and fell to stuffing their instruments into their covers, and behind the hurrying musicians the last stragglers took up the march to town. Not a firecracker had exploded all day; no fireworks enlivened the evening, though the grounds of the chief plaza and several smaller parks were gaudy with colored electric lights set out in the form of flower-plots, and similar lights outlined the municipal theater into which all those who had attended services in the morning, with the exception of the ecclesiastics, crowded to hear “Rigoletto” sung by fresh young Italian voices with more power than polish.

The “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” has several lines in and about Mendoza province, with frequent trains out through the vineyard districts. One train travels an S-shaped route and comes back to the station from which it starts without covering any of the ground twice, then makes the same trip in the opposite direction. When I rose at dawn, the Andes stood out against the sky as if they had been cut out of cardboard; by the time I had reached the station long banks of steel-gray clouds were rising like a steam curtain under the rays of the red sun, until the range was all but hidden from view. My journey through the vineyards uncovered great peaks capped with snow and glaciers that seemed to touch the sky, and everywhere were grapevines, stretching away in endless rows, between some of which oxen were plowing and men hoeing, vineyards limited only by the horizon or the Cordilleras in the background. As there is little natural campo on which to fatten herds in Mendoza province and insufficient rainfall to make wheatfields productive, grapes were introduced here half a century ago by Spaniards who brought them over from Chile. The torrents pouring down from mighty Aconcagua were caught and put to work, and wherever there is irrigation grapes grow abundantly in what was a bushy Arizona when the first settlers came, until to-day the province does indeed resemble California. For a long time Mendoza furnished the Argentine all its wine. Then Europe began sending it over at prices that competed, the vineyards spread into neighboring provinces along the base of the Andes, and Mendoza lost its monopoly. When the railroad came, it brought French, Spanish, and Italian peasants who knew grapes as they knew their own families, and the Argentine became the greatest wine-producing country in all the world outside western Europe. Now there is a little corn, alfalfa, and grain, though all these are insignificant compared to the principal product. Spaniards I met along the way asserted that corn or wheat paid better now than grapes, so low in price as to be scarcely worth picking, and that olives would do best of all, if only the growers would bring in experienced workmen and give the trees proper care.

I left Mendoza on a crisp May morning, and the autumn leaves I had not seen for years were falling so abundantly that a line from “Cyrano de Bergerac” kept running through my head, “Regardez les feuilles, comme elles tombent.” Here they lay drifted under the rows of slender yellowed poplars which stretched away through the vineyards, endless brown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army and backed far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering forth far above as the day grew. Between the rows glided Oriental looking people, lightly touching them on either side, bent on unknown errands, for the fruit was nowhere being gathered. Unpicked grapes, shriveled to the appearance of raisins, covered even the roofs and bowers and patios of the flat adobe houses. Here and there a weeping willow or an alfalfal showing the advantages of irrigation gave a contrasting splotch of deep green to the velvety-brown immensity. Before his majestic entrance the god of the Incas gilded to flaming gold a fantastic white cloud high up above his eastern portal, then lighted up the files of yellowing poplars, then brought out the golden-brown of the vast vineyards, gave a delicate pink shade to the range of snow-clads away to the west, and at last burst forth from the realms of night in a fiery glory that quickly flooded all the landscape.

I am not sure that I have ever seen nature so nearly outdo herself as in this dawn and sunrise across the vineyards of Mendoza, while we crept upward from the Argentine toward the Cordilleras. No other hour of the day, certainly, could have equaled this, and it made up amply for the discomfort of being routed out of our comfortable cabins on the “International” before daybreak, to wash in icy water and stumble about in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled, before we had been permitted to board the little narrow-gauge transandino train, so tiny in contrast to the roomy express that had carried us across the pampas that one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one’s fellow-travelers. Across the aisle sat a priest with an open church-book, mumbling his devotions and crossing himself at frequent intervals, but never once raising his head to glance out the window. No doubt when he gets to Heaven he will falsely report that the earth has no landscapes to vie with those of the celestial realms. Over me swept a desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails and feel the exhilarating mountain air cut deep down into my lungs, sweeping through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the magnificent scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched along, however slowly, without respect either for nature or my own inclinations.

The day turned out brilliant and cloudless; in full sunshine the scene lost some of its delicate beauty of coloring, though still retaining its grandiose majesty. The vast pampa sank gradually below us as we turned away toward the mountains, the irrigated green patches grew almost imperceptible. Slowly the plain itself was succeeded by fields of loose rocks on which vegetated a few gaunt, deformed trees, spiny bushes, gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation. The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed foothills of many colors, rolling up to the base of abrupt mountains that climbed, rugged and unkempt and independent of all law and order, like some stupendous stairway to heaven, to the clouds in which their tops disappeared. Cliffs washed into every imaginable shape by centuries of hail, snow, and mountain winds—for there is no rain in this region—cast dense black shadows, which in the narrow valleys and tiny scoops and hollows contrasted with the thousand sun-flaming salient knobs and points and spires and hillocks—a lifeless stony barrenness only enhanced by the scattered tufts of a hardy yellow-brown bush barely a foot high.

Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the river Mendoza, fed by the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise ever higher, while the river itself grew from a phlegmatic stream of the plain to a nervous mountain brook racing excitedly past through deep, narrow, rock gorges. The rare stations were “beautified” with masses of colored flowers that would have been pretty enough in their place, but which here looked tawdry and seemed to mock man’s feeble efforts to vie with nature in her most splendid moods. Above Cachueta, noted for its hot baths exploited by the city of Mendoza, in so dismal a landscape that visitors come only from dire necessity, all vegetation had disappeared and all the visible world had grown dry and rocky and barren as only the Andes can be in their most repellant regions. Not even the cactus remained to give a reminder of life; not even a condor broke the deadness of the peaks which seemed cut out with a knife from the hard heavens. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable surprise,—the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But this oasis did not last long, and soon the dull, reddish-brown cliffs shut us in again. Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. One seemed imprisoned for life within these enormous walls; the utter absence of life, the uniformity of the dry desolation, especially the oppressive, monotonous solitude, enhanced by a dead silence broken only by the panting of the sturdy little locomotive crawling upward on its narrow cogwheel track and the creaking of the inadequate little cars behind it, seemed to hypnotize the travelers and plunge them into a sort of stupor from which nothing short of imminent disaster would arouse them.

Between ever higher stations the only signs of man were rare casuchas, huts of refuge built of the same dreary material as the hills, tucked away here and there against the mountainsides. Before the building of the railroad these served travelers as shelters for the night or against the dreaded temporales, hurricanes of the winter-bound Cordillera. At the Puente del Inca, a natural rock bridge under which the Mendoza River has worn its way in a chasm, we caught the first clear glimpse of Aconcagua, its summit covered with eternal snow and ice. Yet it seemed small compared with the tropical giants of Chimborazo and Huascarán, with their immense slopes of perpetual blue glaciers, perhaps because there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to believe the scientists who rank it the highest in the western hemisphere. By this time snow lay in patches about us and stretched in streaks up every crevice and sheltered slope, yet the mammoth glacier peaks and striking Alpine beauty one expected was little in evidence.

As we drew near Las Cuevas, the increasing desire for a mountain tramp, coupled with that of seeing the famous “Christ of the Andes” which the traveler by train comes nowhere near, caused me to sound several of my cosmopolitan fellow-travelers on the suggestion of leaving the train and walking over the summit. But the few of them who did not rate me hopelessly mad felt they could not spare the three days between this and the next train, even if they were not seriously infected with the tales of Chilean bandits. Yet I could not sit supinely in a railway coach and be dragged through a dingy, three-mile tunnel, to come out on the other side without having seen a suggestion of the real summit. Besides, there was another excellent reason to drop off the train at Las Cuevas. There, at the mouth of the international tunnel, my Argentine pass ended, and the fare through and over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail, was almost twenty dollars. Even second-class, with the privilege of sitting on a wooden bench in a sort of disguised box-car, was but little less than that, and it was noticeable that all but the well-dressed had disappeared from this also, the most expensive bit of railroading in the world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file. These high rates make the Andes a doubly strong barrier against immigration from the more crowded and less capacious Pacific slope, which is to the argentino’s liking, for on the eastern side the Chilean is hated and feared, all the talk of international affection notwithstanding, as something between a cruel and piratical Indian and a Prussianized tradesman.

As we drew into Las Cuevas I gathered together the essentials of kodak and note-book and turned the rest of my baggage over to a young Norwegian on his way to Valparaiso, with a request to leave it at Los Andes, where the transandino joins the government railways of Chile.

The train went on. The detachment of Argentine police that had given it their protection up from Mendoza clambered upon the released engine and went back down the mountain, and I found myself stranded and almost alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet above sea-level. A quick movement instantly reminded one of the height, an altitude doubly impressive at this latitude and at this season. Even near midday it was not particularly warm in the sunshine and it was decidedly cold in the shadows. Yet I must climb more than three thousand feet higher to get over into Chile. The section-gangs of half-Indians, in their heavy knit caps without visors and thick woolen socks reaching to the knees, were a sullen, cruel looking crew, with marks of frequent dissipation on their bronzed faces, men suggesting the Andean Indian stripped of his humility and law-abiding nature and gifted with the trickery that comes to primitive races from contact with the outside world.

With sunset it grew bitter cold, an icy wind howling and moaning incessantly even through the chinks of the dismal, guestless frontier hotel in which a coarse and soggy supper cost me three pesos. When it was finished, the landlord led the way out into the frigid, blustery mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into the first room of what is in summer-time a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. What he would have done had a lone lady also stopped here for the night I do not know—wired to Mendoza, perhaps, for a chaperon. I burrowed under a veritable wagon-load of quilts. Two or three times during the night I awoke and peered out the curtainless window upon the bleak, jagged snow-clads piled into the starlight above, each time wondering whether day was near, but there was no way of knowing, for not a sound was to be heard above the howling of the wind and the shivering of the doors and windows of the unsheltered wood structure.

At last there seemed to be something faintly brighter about the white crest of the range, and I coaxed myself out of bed. The darkness was really fading. I drank the cup of cold tea I had prevailed upon the landlord to leave with me the night before, strapped on my revolver for the first time since leaving Bolivia, and set out as soon as I could see the next step before me. The automobile road that zigzags up the face of the range, accomplishing the journey to the “Cristo” in seven kilometers of comparatively easy gradients in the bright summer days of December and January, was heaped high with snow in this May-day winter season and was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took what had been pointed out to me the day before as a short cut and, picking up a faint trail, set out to scramble straight up the barren, rocky slope toward the grim, jagged peaks above.

For hours I clawed my way upward through loose shale and broken rock, all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, slipping back with every step, filling my low shoes of the city with sand, snow, and the molten mixture of both, panting as only he can understand who has struggled up an almost perpendicular slope in the rare atmosphere of high altitudes, my head dizzy and my legs trembling from the exertion. Every now and then I had to cross a patch of hard snow or ice so steep I must clutch with toes, heels, knees, and fingernails to keep from doing a toboggan to perdition hundreds of feet below. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to spring like a chamois from one jagged rock to another, at the imminent peril of losing my balance once for all. In many places the mountain itself was made of such poor material that it came apart at the slightest strain, so that many a time I laid hands upon a rock only to have it come sliding down toward me, threatening to carry my mangled remains with it to the bottom of the valley. I would gladly have gone down again and, after kicking the “short cut” informant, made a new start, but that was next to impossible. It was difficult enough to climb these great toboggan fields of loose shale and ice; it would have been a rare man who could have descended them whole without at least the aid of an Alpine stock. There remained no choice than to keep on picking my way back and forth across the face of the cliff, gradually clawing upward, reviving my spirits now and then by eating a handful of snow, always subconsciously expecting to receive a well-aimed shower of stones or knives from a group of bandits ensconced in one of the many splendid hiding-places about me.

I had lost myself completely and, convinced that I was in for an all-day struggle, could have met with resignation the lesser suffering meted out by bandits, when I suddenly struck what proved to be a gravelly ridge between two peaks and on it an iron caisson marking the international boundary. Far from coming out at the “Christ of the Andes,” I found the famous statue standing in utter solitude in a sandy pocket of the mountains free from snow so far below me that it looked almost miniature. By the time I had climbed down to it, however, the figure itself, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope will be perpetual peace between them, grew to several times life size and took on an impressiveness much enhanced by its solitary setting.

Not a sign of humanity had I seen or heard when I emptied my shoes and set off down the opposite slope. On the Chilean side the highway was drifted still deeper with snow, in places stone hard, in others so soft that at every step I sank knee-deep into it. The brilliant sun that had cheered me on all the breathless climb here grew so ardent that I was forced to shed my outer clothing. I was present at the birth, nay, the very conception, of the River Juncal, which later joins the Aconcagua and flows into the Pacific, for I had stood even higher than the point where the snow and glaciers begin to melt and trickle down the mountain. It is this foaming blue river which carves out the route down into Chile, leaving highway and railroad the precarious task of following it down the swift and insecure slope.

Near the mouth of the international tunnel the Lago del Inca, beautiful in its setting of haggard mountain faces, reflected the blue of the glaciers and the white of the snow peaks above. From there on all was comparatively easy going, for though the sharp ballasting of the little narrow cogwheel railroad mercilessly gashed and tore my shoes, I had already saved enough in fare to buy several pairs. Now and then I met a work-train straining upward out of the mouth of a sheet-iron snow-shed or one of the many long dark tunnels through which I passed with hand on revolver butt. By the time I had met several section-gangs, however, dismal, piratical looking fellows, with a suggestion of Japanese features, in ragged patched ponchos and wide felt hats, I decided that they were more savage in appearance than in character, and when at last a whole gang of these reputed cut-throats left off work to show me a short cut, I laid away the stories I had heard of them along with the fanciful tales of danger I had gathered in many other parts of the world. They were rotos indeed, “broken” not only in the sartorial Spanish sense in which the word is used in Chile, but in the meaning it has in American slang. Not a suggestion did they have in manner or features of that hopefulness of the Argentine masses, but rather the air of men perpetually ill or saddened by a recent death in the family, who lost no opportunity to drown their sorrows in strong drink.

There were grades as steep as ten per cent. in the rackrail line down which I strode at forty cents a mile. In places the western face of the range was so steep that the mountain fell almost sheer for hundreds of feet to the railroad, the loose shale seeming ready to drop in mighty avalanches and bury everything at the slightest disturbance, and suggesting some of the problems faced by the American engineers who built the more difficult Chilean half of the transandino. The station of Juncal, perched on a rock, posed as a railway restaurant, but at sight of its price-list I fled in speechless awe, and at the next stream below fell upon the lunch I had been brilliant enough to pilfer from my Argentine supper the evening before. The tiny brook that had trickled from under the snow below the “Cristo” had swollen to a scarcely fordable river when, toward evening, with twenty-eight miles, or more than eleven dollars’ worth, of ups and downs behind me, the huts that had begun to appear, carelessly tucked in among the broken rocks and mammoth boulders of the Rio Juncal, collected at last into a little village called Rio Blanco, in which I found an amateur lodging. I had heard that Chile was different from the other west-coast countries, but this first glimpse of it scarcely bore out the assertion. Here were the same squalor, cur dogs, chicha—even though it was made from grapes—Indian fatalism and indifference to progress with which I had grown so familiar in the other lands of the Andes.

Descending still farther into Chile next morning, I met a fellow tramp limping toward the summit, a mere bundle of whiskers and rags, evidently a German, though he was either too surly or too sad to speak, carrying all his possessions in a grain-sack, his feet wrapped in many folds of burlap. The twenty-two miles left were an easy day’s stroll, much of it through the rocky canyon of the river that had roared all night in my ears. In mid-morning I passed the famous “Salto del Soldado,” where the railroad leaps across an abysmal chasm with the Rio Juncal brawling and foaming at its bottom, from one tunnel directly into another, and over which hovers the legend of some soldier jumping to fame and death in the revolt against Spanish rule. I had dinner in an outdoor dining-room under a red-flowered arbor beside the track, where a large steak—of rhinoceros, I fancy—corn cakes fried in grease, excellent coffee, and endless chatter from the pudding-like Chilean woman serving it, cost only a peso—and the peso of Chile is but little money indeed. The woman had never in her life been a mile farther up the valley, so that I was an object of the deepest interest to her as a denizen of the unknown world above and beyond the jagged snow-clad range that bounded her horizon.

By afternoon the weather had become like May at home. There was nothing autumnal about it except the pencil-like Lombardy poplars touched with yellow along the beautiful valley of the Juncal, back up which one looked almost wonderingly at the glacier-capped range walling off the rest of the world. The country was very dry, the hills inclosing it rocky and half-sterile, yet enlivened by the green of the organ cactus which grew plentifully, the more distant ranges showing a faint red tinge through their general blackness. Some of the parched fields were being plowed with oxen. Gradually the mountains flattened themselves out, a genuinely Andean traffic of mules, straw-laden donkeys, and half-Indian arrieros on foot grew up along the broad highway following the valley, now well inhabited, chiefly in huts thrown together of a few reeds or willows, as if there was nothing to look forward to but perpetual summer. The once narrow gorge had expanded to a broad, well-settled valley that suggested California when, in the later afternoon, footsore, but many dollars ahead, I wandered into the town of Santa Rosa de los Andes, junction point of the most expensive and one of the cheapest railroads in the world, and found my half-forgotten baggage awaiting me.

At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the Andes” in a bleak and arid setting

The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile

On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in among the boulders

The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a fertile valley

The bewhiskered conductor of the express which snatched me on into the night looked like the Bowery at five in the morning. Indeed, one noticed at once a wide difference between the prosperous spick-and-spanness of the Argentine and squalid, uncheerful, roto Chile, whether in the crowds of poor people quarreling over the few crumbs of coal to be found in the cinder heaps at the edge of town or in the general appearance of the government railway and its rather unkempt employees. I fell asleep soon after the train started at seven, woke once when we seemed to be rushing through high hills and over deep valleys, and again at a station where the one employee and the two policemen were wrapped to the eyes in ponchos heavy enough for the Arctic circle. Then myriads of lights flashed up out of the night ahead, the brakes ground us to a halt, and we were set down at a station named “Mapocho,” which turned out to be one of three serving Santiago, capital of Chile.

CHAPTER V
CHILEAN LANDSCAPES

Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side.

This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all Chile. The roto who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train, who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country. With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel. The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos Aires.

The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of cités or conventillos, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded, unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country.

The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of “saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous, doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral; the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list of imposing buildings. Long galerías, roofed passages that are virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings, and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom.

Of late years many of these old families have found that they can materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been almost wholly obliterated. Under the portales of a palatial, red-brick building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands, uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are sold the favorite dishes of the gente de medio pelo, the ragged masses,—mote molido (boiled and mashed ripe corn); mote con huesillos (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the thick, greasy soup known as cazuela. The half-trained tailors, to whom no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively mujeres de manto, dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of color adding to the general gloom of the town.

In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce, drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza. The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the alpargatas, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called hojotas common to the roto class. Some of these countrymen come riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the morning hideous with their deliveries.

It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all, have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has broken the ice of costumbre, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early and often to tuberculosis.

Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy, soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required by the human system that I recall having run across in South America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a Protestant church is a church, even in Chile.

Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising “Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism.

Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward, the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass, readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the intellectuales of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat, lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his fellow-intellectuales, for it would have been attacking one of their most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence from the more humble origin.

There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of futres, bomberos, and rotos. The first are well-dressed street-corner loafers; the bomberos are volunteer firemen, and the rotos form the ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The latter, said never to be without the corvo, an ugly curved knife, with which they are quick to tripear, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous, but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood. Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of the Mercurio office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and slouches are the rule among the female division of the roto class, and Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. In the Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen, and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them decidedly from the people of eastern South America.

Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which the ostensibly free-voting roto has little real hand. The “best families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the voter must be able to read and write, and any roto whom the landlords do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the roto not only free of speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his corvo, but ready to fight for himself in more modern ways.

“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution. The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country. You have something of that problem in the United States, but the proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.”

Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable. One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside Santiago in a decade.

History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a world monopoly of nitrate, or salitre, as the Chilean calls it, the only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the “saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton, who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,” insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.”

The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he, and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less active and has less initiative than the more European argentino.

Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books, because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere ranchos to modern several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America, and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater prevalence of wooden structures.