bullock carts, and often we had to go alongside it, or leave it entirely where at some crossing of a small stream the ground looked too boggy for us to venture in with the motor

cars.

Three times in making such a crossing one of the cars bogged down, and we had hard work in getting out. In one case it caused us two hours' labor in building a stone causeway under and in front of the wheelsrepeating what I had helped do not many months before in Arizona, when we struck a place where a cloudburst had taken away the bridge across a stream and a good part of the road that led up to it on either side.

In another place the leading car got into heavy sand and was unable to move. A party of gauchos came loping up, and two of them tied their ropes to the car and pulled it backwards on to firm ground. These gauchos were a most picturesque set. They were riding good horses, strong and hardy and wild, and the men were consummate horsemen, utterly indifferent to the sudden leaps and twists of the nervous beasts they rode. Each wore a broad silver-studded belt, with a long knife thrust into it. Some had their trousers in boots, others wore baggy breeches gathered in at the ankle. The saddles, unlike our cow saddles, had no horns, and the rope when in use was attached to the girth ring. The stirrups were the queerest of all. Often they were heavy, flat disks, the terminal part of the stirrup leather being represented by a narrow metal, or stiff leather, bar a foot in length. A slit was cut in the heavy flat disk big enough to admit the toe of the foot, and with this type of stirrup, which to me would have been almost as unsatistory as no stirrup at all, they sat their bucking or jumping horses with complete indiffer

ence.

It was gaucho land through which we were traveling. Every man in it was born to the saddle. We saw tiny boys not only riding but performing all the duties of full-grown men in guiding loose herds or pack-animals. No less characteristic than these daredevil horsemen were the lines of great two-wheeled carts, each dragged by five mules, three in the lead, with two wheelers, or else perhaps drawn by four or six oxen. For the most part these carts were carrying wool or hides. Occasionally we came on great pastures surrounded by wire fences. Elsewhere the stony, desolate land lay as it had lain from time immemorial. We saw many flocks of sheep, and many herds of horses, among

which piebald horses were unusually plentiful. There were a good many cattle too, and on two or three occasions we saw flocks of goats. It was a wild, rough country, and in such a country life is hard for both man and beast. Everywhere along the trail were the skeletons and dried carcasses of cattle, and occasionally horses. Yet there were almost no carrion birds, no ravens or crows, no small vultures, although once very high up in the air we saw a great condor. Indeed, wild life was not plentiful, although we saw ostriches-the South American rhea-and there was an occasional guanaco or wild llama. Foxes were certainly plentiful, because at the squalid little country stores there were hundreds of their skins and also many skunk skins.

Now and then we passed ranch houses. There might be two or three fairly close together, then again we might travel for twenty miles without a sign of a habitation or a human being. In one case there was a cluster of buildings and a little schoolhouse. We stopped to shake hands with the teacher. Some of the ranch houses were cleanly built and neatly kept, shade trees being planted round about-the only trees we saw during the entire motor journey. Other houses were slovenly huts of mud and thatch, with a brush corral near by. Around these houses the bare dirt surface was filthy and unkempt, and covered with a litter of the skulls and bones of sheep and oxen, fragments of skin and hide, and odds and ends of all kinds, foul to every sense.

Every now and then along the road we came to a solitary little store. If it was very poor and squalid, it was called a pulperia; if it was large, it was called an almacen. Inside there was a rough floor of dirt or boards, and a counter ran round it. At one end of the counter was the bar, at which drinks were sold. Over the rest of the counter the business of the store proper was done. Hats, blankets, horse gear, rude articles of clothing, and the like were on the shelves or hung from rings in the ceiling. Sometimes we saw gauchos drinking at these bars-rough, wild-looking men, some of them more than three parts Indian, others blond, hairy creatures with the northern blood showing obviously. Although they are dangerous men when angered, they are generally polite, and we had no trouble with them. Hides, fox skins, and the like are brought by them for sale or for barter.

Order is kept by the mounted territorial

police, an excellent body, much like the Canadian mounted police. These men are alert and soldierly, with fine horses, well-kept arms, and smart uniforms. Many of them were obviously mainly, and most of them were partly, of Indian blood. As I have already As I have already explained, I think the Indian blood on the whole a distinct addition to the race stock when the ancestral Indian tribe is of the right kind. The Acting President of the Argentine during my visit, the Vice-President, a very able and forceful man, wealthy, well educated, a thorough statesman and man of the world, and a delightful companion, had a strong strain of Indian blood in him.

A third

Indeed, it seemed to me that the people I met used "Indian" as having a theological rather than a racial significance. In one place where we stopped four Indians came in to see us. The chief or head man looked like a thorough Indian. He might have been a Sioux or a Comanche. One of his companions was apparently a half-breed, showing strong Indian features, however. had a full beard, and, though he certainly did not look like a white man, no less certainly he did not look like an Indian. The fourth was considerably more white than Indian. He had a long beard, being dressed, as were the others, in shabby white man's garb. He looked much more like one of the poorer class of Boers than like any Indian I have ever seen. I saw this man talking to two of the mounted police. They were smart, well-setup men, thoroughly identified with the rest of the population, and regarding themselves and being regarded by others as on the same level with their fellow-citizens. Yet they were obviously far more Indian in blood than was the unkempt bearded white man to whom they were talking, and whom they and their fellows spoke of as an Indian, while they spoke of themselves, and were spoken of by others, as "Christians." "Indian" seemed to be the term reserved for the Indians who were still pagans and who still kept up a certain tribal relation. Whenever an Indian adopted Christianity in the excessively primitive form known to the gauchos, came out to live with the whites, and followed the ordinary occupations, he seemed to be promptly accepted as a white man, no different from any one else. The Indians, by the way, now have property, and are well treated. Nevertheless the pure stock is dying out, and those that survive are being absorbed in the rest of the population.

The various accidents we met with during the forenoon delayed us, and we did not take breakfast-or, as we at home would call it, lunch-until about three o'clock in the afternoon. We had then halted at a big group of buildings which included a store and a Government telegraph office. The store was a long, whitewashed, one-story house, the bedrooms in the rear, and all kinds of outbuildings round about. In some corrals near by a thousand sheep were being sheared. Breakfast had been long deferred, and we were hungry. But it was a feast when it did come, for two young sheep or big lambs were roasted whole before a fire in the open, and were then set before us; the open-air cook was evidently of almost pure Indian blood.

On we went with the cars, with no further accidents and no trouble except once in crossing a sand belt. The landscape was parched and barren. Yet its look of almost inconceivable desolation was not entirely warranted, for in the flats and valleys water could evidently be obtained a few feet below the surface, and where it was pumped up anything could be grown on the soil.

But, unless thus artificially supplied, water was too scarce to permit any luxuriance of growth. Here and there were stretches of fairly good grass, but on the whole the country was covered with dry scrub a foot or two high, rising in clumps out of the earth or gravel or sand. The hills were stony and bare, sometimes with flat, sheer-sided tops, and the herds of half-wild horses and of cattle and sheep, and the even wilder riders we met, and the squalid little ranch houses, all combined to give the landscape a peculiar touch.

As evening drew on, the harsh, raw sunlight softened. The hills assumed a myriad tints as the sun sank. The long gloaming followed. The young moon hung overhead, well toward the west, and just on the edge of the horizon the Southern Cross stood upside down. Then clouds came up, boding a storm. The night grew black, and on we went through the darkness, the motormen clutching the steering-wheels and peering anxiously forward as they strove to make out the ruts and faint road-marks in the shifting glare of the headlights. The play of the lightning and the rolling of the thunder came nearer and nearer. We were evidently in for a storm, which would probably have brought us to a complete halt, and we

looked out for a house to stop at. At 10:15 we caught a glimpse of a long white building on one side of the road. It was one of the stores of which I have spoken. With some effort we roused the people, and after arranging the motor cars we went inside. They were good people. They got us eggs and coffee, and, as we had a cold pig, we fared well. Then we lay down on the floor of the store and on the counters and slept for four hours.

At three we were up again, and started as soon as the faint gray of the dawn enabled us to see the road. The sunrise was glorious. We came out from among the hills on to vast barren plains, and drove at speed over them. Before leaving we had had bread and coffee, and ten hours later, at two in the afternoon, we halted at another little store, which, curiously enough, was kept by

Syrian immigrants, and there ate another meal of cold meat, eggs, and bread, and resumed our journey. At one spot we struck a couple of miles of heavy sand, and here we were met by some mounted police, who with ropes helped two of the cars which stuck at intervals.

It was then after sunset, and when' we reached the Rio Negro all light was just dying out of the sky and a heavy storm was coming up. There is a rope ferry across the river, and after some argument with the ferryman, who objected to crossing in the storm, we managed to get over, and then, driving the cars through fiords and up sandhills as best we could, we reached the train at ten o'clock, after eighteen hours' hard going. We were healthily tired and hungry, we had had a delightful trip, and we slept well that night.

W

E New Yorkers have a rather exuberant habit of celebrating many anniversaries of many, many kinds. Seldom, however, do we approach one of these so well deserving of grateful remembrance by all our people as the anniversary which will come, and probably pass rather quietly, on May 1 of the present year. That day will mark the completion of twentyfive years of free lectures given to our people by our city under the auspices of the Board of Education.

Sending the adult to school again! It is not an easy task, and a quarter-century ago no modern community had ventured to attempt it. But to our city the problem was one almost of life and death. A vast populace of earnest but ignorant foreigners are constantly crowding in upon our own halfeducated masses. Power, infinite power, is among us in that horde of eager faces upturned toward the light. But it is power still undeveloped, and therefore dangerous— power still enchained in semi-darkness.

So it was to open the doors of knowledge

to the adult that the New York Public Lecture System was started in 1889. It was a lusty babe even in the first of its twenty-five years. twenty-five years. Some thirty lectures were given in each of half a dozen halls. To-day the system has become a giant indeed, finding voice in nearly two hundred halls and over seven hundred lecturers. Similar systems, offsprings of this parent one, have started in dozens of other cities both in America and abroad.

Just how much do you, personally, know about this New York Public Lecture System, which has been called "the greatest university ever conceived"? I still meet occasionally the acquaintance who asks me, idly, "Well, who gives these lectures, anyway; and where; and why? And who goes to them?" You will recognize that type of inquirer. He is the hidebound New Yorker who has made his little financial success and got hopelessly engulfed in the idea that New York consists solely of a glittering cluster of theaters and hotels, with a swift automobile path stretching in a thin thread between