pampa. They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy
poplar, which of all trees is the easiest one to grow in that land.
And these trees at the estancias or cattle-ranches were, at the time I
am writing about, almost invariably aged and in many instances in an
advanced state of decay. It is interesting to know how these old
groves and plantations ever came into existence in a land where at
that time there was practically no tree-planting.

The first colonists who made their homes in this vast vacant space,
called the pampas, came from a land where the people are accustomed to
sit in the shade of trees, where corn and wine and oil are supposed to
be necessaries, and where there is salad in the garden. Naturally they
made gardens and planted trees, both for shade and fruit, wherever
they built themselves a house on the pampas, and no doubt for two or
three generations they tried to live as people live in Spain, in the
rural districts. But now the main business of their lives was cattle-
raising, and as the cattle roamed at will over the vast plains and
were more like wild than domestic animals, it was a life on horseback.
They could no longer dig or plough the earth or protect their crops
from insects and birds and their own animals. They gave up their oil
and wine and bread and lived on flesh alone. They sat in the shade and
ate the fruit of trees planted by their fathers or their great-
grandfathers until the trees died of old age, or were blown down or
killed by the cattle, and there was no more shade and fruit.

It thus came about that the Spanish colonists on the pampas declined
from the state of an agricultural people to that of an exclusively
pastoral and hunting one; and later, when the Spanish yoke, as it was
called, was shaken off, the incessant throat-cutting wars of the
various factions, which were like the wars of "crows and pies," except