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.

“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.