Buenos Ayres reminded me somewhat of Paris, where I had once spent a few days. There were the same cafes, with little tables set out on the pavement, where men and women sat drinking and chattering in the evening. The same luxurious restaurants ablaze with gilt, large mirrors, and unsubstantial but profuse ornamentation, which were crowded at night with men, and women in beautiful evening gowns. There appears to be very little home life there, and the whole city seems to take its meals at restaurants.

In the time of the war with Napoleon the town was in the hands of the English. The British troops were one day marshalled on parade in the Calle Victoria without cartridges. Suddenly, in accordance with a pre-arranged conspiracy, a heavy fire was opened upon them by the Argentines, who were in hiding in the upper storeys of the houses lining the street. No resistance was possible, as each house was barricaded inside. The men were shot down and their flags taken. These trophies are the pride of the city. There is a story that once the Argentine authorities, wishing to ingratiate themselves with Britain, offered to return them, to which the British Minister replied: "When we want them we will come and fetch them." The Argentine version of this yarn is that the British asked for the return of the flags, and they were told to come and take them if they wanted them.

The Argentine has good laws, but all classes are so corrupt that it is almost impossible to get judges who will administer them without bribery, and as every man goes armed with knife or revolver, there are plenty of shindies.*

Take a number of men of the Latin races which fringe the northern coasts of the Mediterranean. cross them with South American natives, add a dash of negro blood, and settle this stock for generations in a hot climate; the result will be a people excitable, treacherous, and vain. The city dwellers are weedy and undersized, and look the worse for wear, as though they lived hard; but up country I saw some fine men of the Moorish type-tall, athletic, and black-bearded. They were probably of Moorish blood, and had come from Spain.

The day I landed, two stock-brokers had an argument in one of the main streets, and one shot the other in full view of all the passersby.

I had a letter of introduction to a man who was manager of an estancia (the Spanish term for a sheep and cattle station) in Uruguay, which is across the Rio Plata. He invited me to accompany him there from Buenos Ayres, where he had been staying for a few days. We were to meet on the river steamer, so accordingly I put my luggage on an open carriage and started for the quay. There was not much time to catch the boat, so when we came to a kind of arcade, where the imported stock is kept in pens before being sold, I tried to make my driver understand that he was to go round the block and wait for me at the other end, as I wished to see the agent, who had charge of my rams, and whose office was in the Arcade. When he seemed to "savvy" what I meant I left him, but after a short. talk with the agent could see no sign of the Jehu. I made sure he had bolted with my luggage. As a last resource I engaged another four-wheeler, and told the man to drive to the quay. Half-way there I found coachman No.1 asleep in his carriage, on a piece of waste land off the side of the road, and recovered my goods. Why he was there, and what he thought he was doing, remains a mystery to this day, which I had neither time nor Spanish enough to solve. The main thing was that I got my luggage back and caught the boat

At sundown Don Robert and I went ashore at a small wooden pier. Although the manager was an Englishman, in accordance with the Spanish custom, he was called by his Christian name. Speaking of sundown reminds me of a yarn that one of the cattle-boat skippers told me. He said he was walking on the sunny side of the street one hot day in Buenos Ayres in company with a Spaniard, when the latter remarked chaffingly: "Let's cross over, there's a saying here that 'only Englishmen and dogs walk on the sunny side."' "Oh, indeed! " replied the skipper. "I'm an Englishman; I don't know about you."

We slept that night at a little Spanish hostelry, and next day drove many leagues over the pampas to the estancia. The country was of the same character as nearly all that I saw in Uruguay, low rolling bills and plains covered with coarse grass, with here and there groups of grotesque-shaped cacti.

I put in a very pleasant fortnight at "Merciades," as the place was called, shooting quail, which was very abundant, and a few ostriches, though at this season of the year the plumage of the latter was not in very good condition. When I got my first ostrich, I had hobbled my horse in a slight depression in the ground, and crawled through the long grass, to within seventy yards of the quarry. After securing the bird the horse was nowhere to be found. He had taken fright at the shot, and had been able to canter away with his forelegs hobbled together At least, I suppose his action could only be termed a canter, as it was impossible for him to walk or trot. So I climbed a hill to look round, and saw a herd of young horses in the distance. They were too far off for me to see if my horse was among them, but. re1ying on the gregarious nature of the beast, I thought it probable, and as I approached then I could distinguish my steed by his stiff rocking-horse action, and, after a little trouble, recaptured him, which I was not sorry to do, as several camp steers had begun to follow me curiously. These cattle are not used to seeing a man on foot, and will often rush him, though they will take little notice if you are on horseback. I knew they could do me no harm, as I had my Winchester repeater, but it is hardly the thing to shoot clown your host's live stock.

At the end of a fortnight's stay one of the estancia peons drove me back to the port. There had been heavy rains, followed by a spell of hot weather, which had caused the old ruts on the track near the river-settlement to gape open, sometimes to a depth of five feet, for the soil was very loose : but this did not trouble us, as we drove over the grass at the side of the track. At one place a bridge had been swept away, and as the banks of the stream were too steep for the brake to be of any use, we had to make the horses take the ford at a gallop. It was a very sporting drive-somewhat like a steeplechase. At the little inn I gave the peon a peso (worth about five shillings), to pay for baiting the horse and our dinner, but he had evidently taken this for a tip, and he cleared off with the cart after the meal, leaving me to settle the bill myself.

The rest of the day and the following night were spent going up the river, and an hour before daybreak I landed at Paysandu, and thence travelled some forty or fifty miles up country to Los Merinos estancia, to whose manager I had another introduction-letter. Most of the time I spent shooting deer and other game, sometimes helping to cut out steers from a mob, that would be rounded-up on the camp, as the country surrounding the estancia is called ; this is good sport, as the animal always tries to get back to the mob, and is as fast as a good horse for a short "burst." As tile steer tears round, a good camp horse knows he has to keep between him and the rest of the cattle : the one I rode used to enter into the spirit of the game, and would race and turn and dodge with scarcely a touch from me. By the way, you don't guide a South American horse by the bit, but by moving your hand so that the right or left rein presses against his neck. Personally. I got to like this method better than the English style. Several sheepskins, "cinched" to the horse by a rawhide girth, formed the saddle, or in case of a man who took a pride in his equipment, a guanaco-deer skin, soft as chamois leather, takes the place of one of the sheepskins. The lasso is attached to the girth, so that the weight of the horse takes the strain when the steer is noosed. After the lasso is thrown, you must be careful to keep your horse in a certain position with regard to the roped animal, or you may get your thigh cut open with the lasso, which is of plaited raw-hide, and well greased, so as to run smoothly through its loop. In spite of many tall yarns to the contrary, I don't think it can be used with accuracy at a distance of more than a few yards. The fancy pictures one sees in illustrated magazines, &c., of a gaily-attired cowboy holding one end of a lasso, while the other end is settling with a graceful curve on the neck of a galloping steer about forty yards away, give a false impression of the range at which this weapon can be used. The usual method of roping a young beast, say for branding or gelding, is for a man on horseback to lasso him. among the mob by his horns turn and drag him along, kicking and straggling, when another peon will cleverly lasso his hind legs ; it is then only a matter of a few seconds to stretch him helpless on the ground. The lasso is a dangerous weapon in the hands of a skilful man ; to illustrate this: -Two brothers at Los Merinos had a quarrel I don't know what it was about, but probably a woman one evening at twilight one man waited for the other in the shadow of a clump of trees, near a gate through which he would have to pass. The story was unfolded by the tracks found on the ground next day ; the first man had lassoed the other from horseback, and then had set off at a gallop for the river, with his brother, dragging him on the end of his rope. The latter was probably dead when they reached the water. He was found next day in a water hole, in a trussed-up position, with the long lasso coiled round and round him, and thirteen knife wounds in his body. Harry Fair, the English major-domo, photoed the body as it lay, and gave me a copy.

While I am on the cheerful topic of murder, I must relate a clever bit of knife play that occurred at Los Merinos; and here let me state that when using a knife one never strikes downwards from the shoulder, as actors do on the stage, but with an underhand and upward stroke, as this gives a longer reach. It so happened that one man was chasing another ; the foremost man dare not pull up to turn, as his enemy was close behind him ; thus pressed, he glanced behind, and, as he ran. threw his knife back with a jerk over his shoulder. It stuck in the pursuer's neck, severing the carotid artery, commonly known as the jugular vein. I did not see this incident, but it was related to me by Harry Fair. Fair was a "white" man, and I was sorry to hear, about a year ago, that he had met his death by an accident with his horse.

I used to get very good sport quail-shooting in Uruguay, but there is an annoying bird that hovers round you, uttering discordant squawks, apparently as danger signals to the rest of the feathered creation. Two or three of these officious creatures generally accompanv you when you are out shooting, and warn everything of your approach. An occasional puma is to be met with, a cat-like beast which sometimes reaches twelve feet in length, including the tail. About five feet of him is tail. These stragglers have generally drifted down on detached masses of vegetation from the upper River Plate. I did not get the chance of a shot at one, though one day when riding with the book-keeper of Merciades estancia, both our horses suddenly gave a bound, and broke into a gallop for no apparent reason. We were walking our horses past some thick scrub at the time, where probably they had winded one of those beasts. On this estancia a pony was killed, and another pony clawed over the hind quarters one night by a puma, but they will always slink away from man if they can.

After spending a fortnight at Los Merinos, Fair suggested I should pay a visit to a chum of his, who managed another estancia forty miles up country. There was a pock-marked loafer, half Indian and half Spaniard, with the most villainous phiz I ever saw, hanging about Los Merinos, so I took him with me as a guide.

We started about mid-day. I was mounted on a horse which had a peculiar action, the like of which I had never known before; it would not gallop, or canter, or trot, but as near as I can describe it, ran, as a dog runs. There is a special name in Spanish for horses trained to this action, which I forget, but they are highly valued by the natives. The only way I could ride the brute was to sit tight to the saddle, military fashion, for whenever I managed to urge him into a canter with my revanche, he would straightway drop back into his wretched dog-trot again. A revanche is a whip with a broad, flat, raw-hide flap instead of a lash. At sundown we came to a ford in the Quaguay River, which was approached by a narrow gorge. The river was in flood and my peon would not venture across. We rode back to a small cottage about two hundred yards from the ford, which was the first house we had passed. After a voluble conversation with the man at the cottage, my guide tried to persuade me by signs to dismount and stay there the night, and went through the pantomime of a man drowning to indicate that the river was too flooded to be crossed. However, I did not care to pass the night on guard lest this pair of beauties should rob me, although of course I was armed, so I insisted on trying the ford. It was now dark, and my horse was not used to river work, and, as the current was very swift, instead of bearing against it, and crossing direct, he allowed it to force him sideways towards the lip of the ford, where the deep water began, with every step he took forward ; but I kept his head as much as possible up the river, and so with the help of a liberal dose of revanche I won across safely, as did the guide who was riding behind me. When we got across it was pitch dark, and after riding for a few miles, I began to fancy that I heard a peculiar faint moaning sound in the distance. As we got nearer this was mingled with excited shouts, and we could distinguish a couple of fires burning on the ground. My man did not seem to know what this was, and we approached cautiously. The groaning and moaning corning out of the black night sounded most uncanny, and for a few minutes I suspected that another revolution had suddenly broken out between the whites and the reds [the two political parties] and that the sounds came from some people who had been considerably damaged, especially as I could see from the cautious manner in which my peon approached the fires, that he himself did not know what to make of it.

I felt rather foolish when I discovered that these dismal moanings and groanings, that sounded at least as though a number of folk were being tortured to death, were merely the complaints of a mob of cattle that had been rounded up on the camp of the estancia I was approaching, and the fires were only those at which some peons were cooking their supper. This was decidedly an anti-climax, but if the reader had been in my place I guess he would have been taken in even as I was. That's the worst of writing a yarn about things that happened ; just as the circumstances have worked themselves up, and in fiction would culminate in a thrilling adventure, the whole affair simmers down again in a most prosaic fashion, and the bottom is knocked out of your story.

I had some good deer- shooting at this place, getting seven altogether, two of which I got with No. 4 shot. while crawling up a gully near which they were feeding. Another day I was out with a peon, and after stalking a small herd got an easy shot with a Winchester rifle, at a stag about one hundred and fifty yards away. I felt sure I had hit him, and ran back to where the peon was holding my horse ; he threw me the bridle, and dashed after the stag at a gallop down the gully and up the opposite hill, with me about twenty yards behind him. That stag outpaced us for about a quarter of a mile or more, then dropped. The small-bore bullet had gone clean through him, just behind the ribs, but the shock had not been sufficient to stop him, as would have been the case with a larger bullet. The usual method I pursued was to ride till I caught sight of deer in the distance, then tether my horse, and. take advantage of any broken ground to approach them, getting as near as possible by worming my way on my stomach through the long grass. There were always one or two does acting as sentinels, but never the stag. If you lay quite still, their curiosity would sometimes bring them a little closer, but the stag always kept in the back around. I cured all the skins by pegging them, stretched tightly, on the around, in the heat of the sun, but, owing to rain, several were spoilt their edges went bad, and I had to cut them down, keeping only the middle. While I was at this estancia some heavy rains caused the Quaguay River to get in spate to such an extent that a low-lying wood of lofty trees near the house was almost covered, and on my return I had to cross the river at another point in a boat, with my horse swimming behind, and eventually reached Buenos Ayres, after six weeks of most enjoyable sport. I found the same boat in which I had come, had made a lengthy stay at Rosario, an up-river port waiting for cargo, and was due to sail at three in the morning; so I arranged to go in her, and dined that night with my agent at one of the gorgeous restaurants. We had some specially fine wine for dinner, like port, only with more body, and after that went to the Casino, where I got separated from my cornpanion, and had a few beers (bocks they call them there) and vermouths, with a Russian girl I met who could speak a little English. I found this mixture was getting into my head, and as I had £17 in gold in my pocket, I put clown the last glass untasted, went out, got an open carriage, and drove down to the ship, where I turned in.

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 Chapter One New Zealand 1894

Chapter Two Norway 1895

Chapter Three Exporting 1896

Chapter Five Return To England

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