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