dramatic critics to make surreptitious notes of its ineptitudes upon the margins of their programs. It is an epic drama. The dangling dolls glorify a chapter in Italy's history. Lifeless, they touch with life episodes of a century ago. The history is long, and many Saturday nights are needed for the telling of it.

On this Saturday night the theater is dark, and the one-man box-office deserted. Has the lure of the movie been too great? The whole street seems to hurry in one direction. A corner is rounded, and under the unexpected glare of a thousand lights the black hair of the young girls is dusted with confetti. The wash-tubs have been taken in from their nails, and the fire-escapes have become balconies. Back and forth, Italian colors, strips of satin weighed down with gold fringe, American flags, and the wires of the lights are interlaced until the thin track of sky above the street is hidden. At regular intervals hang cubic ornaments made of berry-boxes wired together and Japanese lanterns. Like bubbles, bal

loons float from the hands of the children as fast as the man with a tank of compressed air inflates the colored bits of rubber.

Excited squeals come from a merrygo-round mounted on a wagon, where the smallest of the children are astride tiny painted horses. At the rear a man turns a crank, and the trilling race begins. There is a great clucking and whipping, with some frightened bawling. Another crank, turned by a small boy in the driver's seat, brings a waltz from the rackety piano, while the patient horse sleeps in the shafts.

The light is caught and tossed between the shining brasses of the two bands. Work-gnarled hands mark time. Old voices, young voices, softly follow the arias of "Gioconda" and "Faust." In the open air Mulberry Street "makes the holy feast."

With the rough timbers concealed by white and silver paper, the shrine stands on the sidewalk. The tip of the Latin cross on the spire touches a fifth-story window where a man in shirt-sleeves leans contentedly and knocks his pipe against the ledge. Damp clothes sag from a line overhead. Before the shrine tall candles burn. Wax heads, arms, feet, are laid upon the altar, appeals from the stricken who beg the good saint for release from pain. Those who can, lay money at the feet of the figure and go away with photographs of the shrine pressed against their lips.

Very slowly the lifesize effigy of the Virgin Mary moves forward from the white niche above the heads of the crowd to the shoulders of six men. The hem of her gown is hidden by dollar bills, votive offerings. All heads are uncovered; old men, old women, the middle-aged, and the little children, carrying tapers, fall into line. So tightly is body pressed against body that the marchers must force their way, guarding with their fingers the flames of their candles. The procession has begun. But the young people stand aside. Says the Italian youth in a striped silk shirt to the Italian girl who

works in a shop on Fifth Avenue and knows what is being worn in the Champs Elysées:

"Come on over and have some mussels."

"Where?" she asks.

Pointing to the oyster-stall, he answers: "Over there, under the wop flag."

They giggle; but the griddle-cakes of New York have spoiled their appetites for these queer shell-fish.

A woman leans from a fire-escape, and from her fingers purple asters rain upon the Virgin.

"It is Naples," mutters the old Neapolitan of Mulberry Bend, and the tears bulge in his eyes.

"It is Messina," whispers the Sicilian from First Avenue.

Along Broadway there is jazz in the tunes of the cafés, there is jazz in the rocketing lights; while on Mulberry Street volunteer acolytes, with pagan festivity, set red fire aglow before the figure of a saint.

CAME to Mendoza in early May, and the autumn leaves I had not seen for years were falling so abun

dantly 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 yellowed, slender poplars that stretched away through the vineyards, endless, autumnbrown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn, standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army, backed far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering forth far above as the day grew.

Between the rows glided Orientallooking people, lightly touching them on each 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 that added to the Oriental aspect of the scene. 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 these files of slender, soldier-like poplars in their autumn yellow, then brought out the autumn 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 red 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 velvetybrown vineyards of Mendoza as 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 to stumble about in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled before we were permitted to board the narrow-gage little transandino train where, in contrast to the roomy train that had carried us across the pampas, one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one's fellow-travelers. Over me swept a surge of desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails, and to feel the exhilarating mountain air cut down into my deepest lungs, to sweep through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched, however slowly, along without respect either for nature or my own inclinations.

The vast, brown plain 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, and gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation. The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed foot-hills 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, in the clouds of 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 enhanced only by the scattered tufts of a hardy, yellow-brown bush barely a foot high. Trees disappeared, with a sort of last adieu, like melancholy friends who have attended the traveler bound on a distant journey just to the turning of the road. Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the Mendoza River, fed by the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise higher and 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 almost garish and seemed to mock puny man's feeble efforts to ape and 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 repulsive 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 behind. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable surprise the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But this enchantment did not last long, and soon the dull, reddishbrown cliffs again shut us in.

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 cog-wheel 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 eminent disaster would arouse them.

Between the 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 mountain-sides. Before the building of the railroad they served travelers as shelters for the night or against the dreaded temporales, or hurricanes, of the winter-bound Cordilleras. 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 Huascaran, with their immense slopes of perpetually blue glaciers, perhaps because there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to believe the scientists who name it the highest in the western hemisphere.

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. However, I could not sit supinely in a railwaycoach and dash through a dingy threemile 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 over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail and tunnel, 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, this most expensive bit of railroading in the world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file.

As we drew into Las Cuevas, therefore, 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, and I found myself stranded and almost alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet above sea-level. 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 and thick woolen socks reaching to the knees, were a sullen, cruel-looking crew, with the 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 me out into the frigid, blustery mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into room Number One of what in summer time is a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. 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 wooden

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 slowly 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 season and was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took what had been pointed out to me 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 the loose shale and broken rock, all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, filling my low city shoes 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, slipping back with every step, 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 it must be clutched with toes, heels, knees, and finger-nails 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. There remained no choice but 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, half-consciously 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 gravely 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 alone and 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 alone, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope will be