140 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



cepted as one of the great Germans whose 

 memory they wished to impress on the minds 

 of their children. In this school there was a 

 good little library, all the books being, of course, 

 German; it was the only library in the town. 



That night we had a very pleasant dinner. 

 Our host was a German. Of the two ladies 

 who did the honors of the table, one was a Bel- 

 gian, the w^ife of the only doctor in Bariloche, 

 and the other a Russian. In our own party, 

 aside from the four of us from the United States, 

 there were Colonel Reybaud, of the Argentine 

 army, my aide, and a first-class soldier; Doctor 

 Moreno, who was as devoted a friend as if he 

 had been my aide; and three other Argentine 

 gentlemen — the head of the Interior Depart- 

 ment, the governor of Neuquen, and the head 

 of the Indian Service. Among the other guests 

 was a man originally from County Meath, and 

 a tall, blond, red-bearded Venetian, a carpenter 

 by trade. After a while we got talking of books, 

 and it was fairly startling to see the way that 

 polyglot assemblage brightened when the sub- 

 ject was introduced, and the extraordinary vari- 

 ety of its taste in good literature. The men 

 began eagerly to speak about and quote from 

 their favorite authors — Cervantes, Lope de 

 Vega, Camoens, Moliere, Shakespeare, Virgil, 



