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cafe (con leche, if possible) and a little bread (and butter 

 also, if possible) ; this lias to suffice until breakfast, which is 

 taken about midday, or at least some time between eleven 

 and two ; finally we have dinner about seven o'clock. There 

 are thus just two regular meals in the day, breakfast and 

 dinner. To resume : I arrived at the inn or fonda, and at 

 once sat down to breakfast. The establishment belonged to 

 an Italian, and the cookery was therefore in the peculiar 

 style affected by that nation; it was characterized by a strik- 

 ing superfluity of garlic and of oil, and was, to a British 

 taste, excessively nasty. The staple soup at this place was 

 sopa de pan — consisting of warm water, in which floated the 

 scraps of bread left over from yesterday's meals. Then 

 came a sort of salt fish, as tough as a piece of wood and 

 floating in an ocean of red oil. Finally I tried a dish 

 called " biftek " in the carte, but which turned out to be 

 pieces of stewed leather, apparently. By this time all my 

 symptoms of hunger had disappeared, and I sallied out to 

 view the town. Nueve de Julio is a small place of a couple 

 of thousand or so inhabitants. Like all Spanish American 

 towns, it consists of a central plaza, laid out with grass and 

 shrubs, and a series of streets running at right angles to one 

 another. It is a very clean little place. The people appear 

 to be pretty decent, and what strikes one is the great polite- 

 ness and obligingness of the lower classes. Everybody goes 

 about armed with a revolver, and, if a native, with a big 

 knife, too. I suspect that this habit may have had some- 

 thing to do with the general politeness, a want of it being 

 punished with a dose of lead or steel. I did not come across 

 any English-speaking people in the place, but I managed to 

 get on all right by means of very ungrammatical Spanish, 

 resorting to French in case of difficulty. I always found 

 people who could speak French wherever I went. I re- 

 mained in Nueve two nights, in the vain hope that my lug- 

 gage might turn up ; there were no signs of it, however, so 

 I determined to start on the morning of the 15th for the 

 Estancia Mate Grande. On that morning, then, the volante 

 arrived at the door, to take me out to Mate Grande, a dis- 



