we thought it was dawn every time we woke up, is more than I can guess. Rusty phonographs screamed at us most of the night from the adjoining houses. How invention has killed the native thrumming of a guitar under a palm-tree or the gaucho's couplets in the shelter of his hut! Truly, Edison has much to answer for as well as to be rewarded for.

The line which the Great Southern hopes soon to push over the Andes to join the railways of Chile in the neighborhood of Temuco ran no trains beyond Neuquen on the Sunday which finally dawned in earnest over our picturesque beds, but in our capacity of 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 Neuquen; at Zapala the winter-andmountain cold was so penetrating as to cause us not merely 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.

On our return to the capital we stopped at an agricultural experiment station, presided over by an American, near the town of Rio Negro. But for a few minor details the mud-reeking frontier hamlet might have been in the Dakotas. There had nowhere been a suggestion of those Patagones, or people of big feet, for which this southern end of South America was named four hundred years ago, though to be sure certain of the wives and daughters of the Italian and Spanish immigrants who make up the bulk of the modern population were not noticeable for the daintiness of their

footprints. Here we were reminded of what may some day happen in all South America, as it has already in the Argentine: not only had the aboriginal Indians wholly disappeared, but the native cholos, or part-breeds, had been driven into miserable shacks in the far corners of the land, on their way to extinction by the flood of European immigration. Hardly a score of the mixed race which holds the majority in the countries of the Andes did we meet in all our journey in Patagonia. There is something unsatisfactory about the Argentine from the point of view of the mere traveler; virtually every "native" one meets turns out to be a Spaniard, a Basque, an Italian, a German, or some other type of foreigner, or at best an argentino from another province.

In Darwin we hired a "soolky," as the argentino calls it, and drove, with the assistance of a cumbersome government ferry, to the island of ChoeleChoel. This thirteen square leagues of exceedingly fertile loam between two branches of the Rio Negro is one of the most prosperous regions in southern Argentine, with half a dozen villages, roads sometimes passable even in a wet season, laid out on the checker-board plan common to our Western States, and noted for the variety of immigration with which it has been peopled. We were particularly interested in seeing what remnants remained of a Welsh colony that had once been established here, both as here, both as a possibly picturesque curiosity and because my companion revolted against returning to the capital without having found a single countryman to whom he could speak without my aid as interpreter. We drove zigzagging along the wide, right-angled earth roads between endless wire fences, behind which many farmers were plowing with oxen and a few with up-to-date riding gang-plows.

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, backed by hills. Hills alone are noteworthy enough to bring a city fame in Argentine. In fact, Córdoba sits in the only rugged part of the country, except where the Andes begin to climb out of it to the

west. Among these Córdoba hills, 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 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 a 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 still 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 vastly inferior to shabby gentility, even though the latter has been refurbished of late years by the 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 dolls; 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 contempt of commerce, which is naturally a contempt of Buenos Aires.

The conservative old families do not, of course, accept new-comers easily. There is a strong race prejudice 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 only one of some thirty churches in a town of a scant thirty thousand inhabitants. By their number and conspicuousness, priests and monks give it an atmosphere quite unlike Buenos Aires, with its scarcely noticeable low Grecian cathedral and its lack of church towers, with its priests rare and unaggressive, as in most of the Argentine. But 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.

Like the majority of the population of the Argentine, the priests and monks are largely of foreign birth, immigrants, so to speak, with Neapolitans and Gallegos most common among them. 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 sturdy old 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 are 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 give a suggestion of Andean aridity in the outskirt region, over which floats also now and then a subtle breath of the tropics.

When I peered out of my sleeping-car cabin next morning, a considerable change of landscape met my eye. The "rapido" was crawling into Santiago del Estero (St. James of the Swamp), 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 coast-lands of Peru or Bolivia, Founded away back in the middle of the sixteenth century, on the bank of a river that becomes salty a little farther on, and which forms in the rainy season large esteros, or brackish backwaters and lagoons, Santiago still suffers intensely for lack of water. 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; a dead-dry yellow prairie grass grew wherever the ground was not frankly sterile.

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 of the several less hardy ones, the ruins of which may be seen just protruding from the sandy bed along the way.

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 this bustling modern Argentine town and capital of any such past. It is a town which lives, breathes, and dreams sugar, which accepts proudly the national nickname of the "City of Sugar." A checker-board place, with 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 electric lights are very much in evidence, yet horsemen resembling those of the Andean wilds may be seen riding along under the trolley-cables. In the central Plaza de la Independencia are orange-trees loaded 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. There are several other squares, one with a statue of Belgrano, who defeated the Spaniards in this neighborhood in 1812 with the aid of “Our Lady of Mercies," whom the general rewarded by appointing her a generalissimo of his armies and a statue of whom is one of Tucumán's few church decorations.

As in most provincial Argentine towns, the visitor has his Hobson's choice between several hotels more pretentious than comfortable, with equally independent waiters and proprietors.

The

scarcity and indifference, not to say insolence, of servants and workmen constitute one of the serious problems in the Argentine, as in all countries of thin population and many opportunities. The sugar men meet this problem by importing laborers from every point of the compass. African slavery was never really established in the Argentine, so that the negro is almost unknown even in this semi-tropical region, where he would feel so much at home. In his stead there are swarthy men from southern Europe, Spaniards and Italians, usually in the higher positions, who come over for the season of a hundred days or so, and go home again at the end of it. Hundreds of workmen are brought up from Santiago del Estero on special trains when the grinding begins; a few far-wandering Hindus, in turbans still, may be found cutting cane, though the pace and heaviness of the other work make it too hard for their frail frames. Above all there are hundreds of collas, as the argentino calls all Bolivians, though in Bolivia the term applies only to residents of the highlands; that is, part-Indian peons from the frontier province of Jujuy and beyond. All these races, and a scattering of others, not a few Chileans among them, are furnished housing if they care to live on the estate, and may buy their food and supplies in the company stores at what the companies assert are cost, or at least greatly reduced, prices. The persistence of Indian types, the racial traits sometimes seen only in the wider openings of the nostrils, in a curious expression of the jet-black eyes or a suggestion of gentleness about the straight-slit mouth never found in the pure Spaniard, is strongly marked in this region.

As in many sugar districts, there is an intermittent fever in Tucumán, here called chuchu, and no pleasant experience, as I can testify without introducing hearsay evidence. The region is blessed also with many bichos, especially troublesome insects of the mosquito and jejene variety. Tucumán is the only province of the Argentine which is producing anything like its possible quota of sugar, though cane is gradually spreading over those adjoining it, particularly to the north. From the city

itself one may make out the dim, blue outlines of the lower Andes in the west, and in clear weather the snow peaks to the north stand out distinctly. The railroad goes on, traversing the province of Salta, with its rich sugar-cane valley, bisecting the great province of Jujuy, where half-wild Indians, with rings in their noses, lips, and ears, do the peon labor; and so on into Bolivia and, with the steamers across Titicaca, to Peru now, though had I descended from the Andes by this route a few months before instead of turning eastward from Cochabamba and reaching Buenos Aires through Paraguay, I should have had to walk some two hundred miles.

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 the overworked consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my exertions in running errands and in eluding annihilation in my contest with Argentine prices, the day seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The International sets out from Buenos Aires 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, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific, thirty-six hours after leaving the Argentine capital.

In this late autumn season the pampa was flooded in many places, the shallow temporary lakes well stocked with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud. Farther west the country grew somewhat drier, or at least more often above water. Here the broad pampa was broken by dense-blue groves of trees, near at hand or on the far horizon-the planted eucalyptus-trees of some proud estancia house. Along the heavy roads between them plunged an occasional automobile, though there were more twowheeled sulkies and cumbersome wagons drawn by several teams of mules or horses. Boys who sat their horses as if they had been born on them loped past

now and then. Or, for long distances, there were almost no signs of animate life except the large flocks of nandues, the ostriches of the pampas, cantering away from the approaching train like awkward school-girls who have as yet but little control over their muscles. Groups of shaggy pampa ponies, and the no less shaggy countrymen who ride them, were gathered about every boliche, or country store and liquor-shop, most of the animals prevented from deserting their owners by having their front feet tied together with rawhide thongs. Bombachas, the bloomer-like lower garments of the pampas, were considerably in evidence among these modern gauchos.

At the more important crossings old men, women, and even little girls stood waving the black-and-yellow flag that means "all safe" to Argentine trainmen, as solemnly as if the entire future of the railroad depended upon each of them individually. County policemen were numerous, riding along the uninviting roads or dismounted at the stations, covered with the dust or mud of travel, mingling with the hardy, independent countrymen of many races. The rural

Argentine police still have a far from perfect reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style of argentino as they once did over the bold, but unsophisticated, gaucho of the "Martin Fierro" type. Yet somehow they were not a body of men to inspire confidence; one felt at a glance that, far from being protected by them, one would need some one else along to protect him from them in the more lonely parts of the country. There being virtually no stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it was not strange that the majority of country houses should be made of the material at hand, namely, mud, as the Eskimos build of snow and ice. Throughout the Argentine it is the custom in the smaller provincial towns to hacer el corso, or parade back and forth, at the station at train-times. Groups of girls, well dressed for such districts, powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair and bodices, their arms interlocked, are not content to display their charms to their admiring fellow-townsmen outside the station

barriers, but invade the platforms and stroll from end to end of it as long as the train remains. As the attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant groups of silent admirers in South America, the latter succeed in increasing the platform throng to a point where it is a lucky traveler who can find room to descend and make his way across it without being swept several times out of his chosen path.

Mendoza, at the very base of the Andes, in what is sometimes called the "Argentine California," is a city of fifty thousand inhabitants, six hundred miles inland from Buenos Aires and barely a fourth as far from the Pacific, though with the mighty wall of the Andes intervening. It is, of course, capital of a province of the same name; virtually all provinces and their capitals bear the same name in the Argentine, for both usually grew up from the central cabildo, or town hall, outwardly. Built on flat ground, with plenty of elbow room and sheltered by the wall of the Andes, the city is laid out in very wide checker-board streets, some of them shaded by rows of magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with ditches made of a mosaic of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy 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 extraordinary vigor. The main business street, though not very long, has a number of modern business buildings, and farther out changes to a handsome avenue with a broad central parkway. Almost all the dwellings, however, are still in the old Spanish style, large houses in many cases, though one only half suspects the several verdant and flowery patios they inclose, for they are large chiefly in depth. No houses and few business buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations of the best regions, with their columned façades and corridors paved with colored marble dalles, are made of baked straw and lime. For Mendoza still remembers the day sixty years ago when an earthquake destroyed the entire town, burying ten thousand per