This hasty run over the Argentine Republic has stirred many pleasant memories in the heart of the writer, and set him hoping that, perchance, some one reader may be tempted to take passage to the River Plate; at less cost than, and quite as luxuriously as, if he made his usual sojourn on the Mediterranean Riviera.

Would I could take him—an intelligently enthusiastic person he, of course, would be—on a personally conducted tour of my own designing.

We would go first to Buenos Aires, reserving the restful charm of Montevideo for after our journeyings. Then down South; where I should quite disabuse my gentle companion of any ideas he might have that the owners of square miles of wheat and thousands of cattle live in top boots and shirt sleeves in one-storied, corrugated-iron verandahed houses in the foreground of threshing machines. I would get him invited—and myself as well—to stay a day or two at an English estancia; the large, well-appointed two or three storied red-brick house of which, surrounded by lawns and spreading cedar trees, would make him rub his eyes several times before he were convinced that he had sailed out of England. He would surely find a house party from Buenos Aires or neighbouring—a wide term meaning, probably, many leagues away—estancias in possession; all the members of which would retain their old habits of dressing for dinner and breakfasting off a choice of several hot dishes and a tempting array of cold things on the sideboard. An English country house, in fact, with hall and magazines and illustrated papers complete.

Then we should make plans for the following, and, probably, many other morrows; plans which would almost inevitably include a neighbourly race meeting or polo match.

Amid all this he could dree his own weird for as long as might please him. I should not disturb any of his promised projects.

But one day I should take him North again; and still further North, to Córdoba, “The Learned City,” show him the Cathedral, the University and its Library, and let him breathe the monastically mediæval atmosphere of it all. And, outside the city, the wildness of cactus growth and gaucho life.

Back eastward to Rosario, merely to change train for Santa Fé, and across the Uruguay to Paraná. From thence to Concórdia; where at least one tranquil orange-scented morning must be spent before one crossed the Province of Entre Rios to where the Argentine North-East Railway should take us to Misiones.

After San Ignacio, the Iguazú Falls and the trip thereto and therefrom up and down the Upper Paraná, I should ask him if he ever wanted to go anywhere else again? Whether he has ever even dreamed of anything so beautiful? Then by river all the way back to Buenos Aires; and, one night, across to Montevideo. There we would sit awhile in the evening and listen to the band in the square where the little coloured lamps swing in the fresh sea breeze; and bathe next morning and roll ourselves in the hot dry sand of Pocitos or Ramirez.

Then we would take railway trips in Uruguay. Over billowy pasturage and through waves of wheat; not flat expanses such as those we shall have seen on the Pampa, but seas of corn-covered, undulating ground.