Through Five Republics on Horseback, Being an Account of Many Wanderings in South America by Ray, G. Whitfield

Argentina's schools and universities are the best in the Spanish- speaking world. In Buenos Ayres you will find some of the finest school buildings in the world, while 4,000 students attend one university.

Buenos Ayres, founded in 1580, is to-day the largest city in the world south of the equator, and is "one of the richest and most beautiful places of the world." The broad prairies around the city have made the people "the richest on earth."

Kev. John F. Thompson, for forty-five years a resident of that country, summarizes its characteristics in the following paragraph: "Argentina is a _land of plenty_; plenty of room and plenty of food. If the actual population were divided into families of ten persons, each would have a farm of eight square miles, with ten horses, fifty- four cows, and one hundred and eighty-six sheep, and after they had eaten their fill of bread they would have half a ton of wheat and corn to sell or send to the hungry nations."

CHAPTER I.

BUENOS AYRES IN 1889.

In the year 1889, after five weeks of ocean tossing, the steamer on which I was a passenger anchored in the River Plate, off Buenos Ayres. Nothing but water and sky was to be seen, for the coast was yet twenty miles away, but the river was too shallow for the steamer to get nearer. Large tugboats came out to us, and passengers and baggage were transhipped into them, and we steamed ten miles nearer the still invisible city. There smaller tugs awaited us and we were again transhipped. Sailing once more toward the land, we soon caught sight of the Argentine capital, but before we could sail nearer the tugs grounded. There we were crowded into flat-bottomed, lug-sailed boats for a third stage of our landward journey. These boats conveyed us to within a mile of the city, when carts, drawn by five horses, met us in the surf and drew us on to the wet, shingly beach. There about twenty men stood, ready to carry the females on their backs on to the dry, sandy shore, where was the customs house. The population of the city we then entered was about six hundred thousand souls.

After changing the little gold I carried for the greasy paper currency of the country, I started out in search of something to eat. Eventually I found myself before a substantial meal. At a table in front of me sat a Scotsman from the same vessel. He had arrived before me (Scotsmen say they are always before the Englishmen) and was devouring part of a leg of mutton. This, he told me, he had procured, to the great amusement of Boniface, by going down on all fours and _baa-ing_ like the sheep of his native hills. Had he waited until I arrived he might have feasted on lamb, for my voice was not so gruff as his. He had unconsciously asked for an old sheep. I think the Highlander in that instance regretted that he had preceded the Englishman.