against rebellion. During the last three months of Señor Alcorta's administration Buenos Aires was on the verge of a pronunciamento. The danger was averted because the President made free use of the antiAnarchist law and the state of siege to lay opponents by the heels. If the failure of the maize crop through the prolonged drought, which is also doing injury to the cattle industry, brings on the financial crisis which many good authorities have been predicting must be the result of recent excessive

speculation in land, then a civil war in Argentina will be highly probable. There is much discontent in the provinces with the high-handed proceedings of the Central Government of Señor Alcorta, and Señor Saenz Peña has been pretty plainly warned that he must not follow the example of his predecessor. Mere violence on the Santa Ana do Livramento model does not commonly occur in Argentina, but a few years ago the whole business community of Rosario stopped work as the best way it could find of forcing the Central Government to bring a local governor to reason. This was simply one method of applying pressure. The rougher method of plain fighting may, and will, be used on provocation and a good opportunity. It must never be forgotten that the men at headquarters are liable to be blinded by greed for their own immediate profit to the dangers they are inourring.

The question how it is pos

sible to account for the prosperity of Brazil, and the truly stupendous increase of wealth in Argentina, if their Governments are what is here desoribed, may fairly be asked. The answer is easy. Men who control the spigot of taxation do not require to be very wise in order to understand that a copious flow of taxable revenue is to their advantage. The Argentine, who is more rational than the Brazilian, grasps this elementary truth more firmly. In both countries prosperity has been made for the natives by foreign capital and labour. The native rulers have allowed them to act. Argentina has been more liberal, because there is in it far less of the puerile vanity, libidinousness, and ferocity which come of negro blood. It has profited accordingly. Three hundred millions of British capital have been poured into Argentina, by the estimate of good authorities. With the capital there have come some forty thousand Englishmen and Scotchmen to manage and to teach. Add the hop-pickers' immigration at the harvest season, a million and a third of Italian settlers mostly from hard working Lombardy and Piedmont, and eight hundred thousand Spaniards. Here you have capital, direction, and labour. There are French, German, and other elements, but they have been subordinate. These foreign managers and workmen, fed by foreign capital, have been allowed to create the cattlebreeding industry and the agriculture of Argentina. Patriotio

I HAD lived in London long enough, with no break but that of a brief yearly holiday and such short absences as I was able to steal from work for shooting with my friends. In winter I made a point of a day's hunting on a Saturday, and hunting by train is tiring and unsatisfactory. London will always have its charms for me. I know it and love it. I can find my way about it in the densest November fog. I feel at home in a thousand odd corners of it. I have been blessed with many friendships made and cemented there. And yet I began to feel that I wanted to make my home in the country, more especially since it seemed likely to be a bachelor home till the end. I have seen too many old London olub bachelors to wish to fossilise into one myself. Only the other day I saw in 'The Times' the death of one of them. I had known him pretty well for twenty years, and liked him; but I had not heard he was ill, and I went to the lodging-house in Bury Street where he had lived. The landlord of the house opened the door to me himself, and I asked sympathetically about my old acquaintance.

"Was any one with him at the end?" I said.

"Oh dear, no, sir; just the nurse in the nursing home we had to take him to. She said he went hoff very nicely. went up the next morning, and

I

I

his cousin, Mr Blackwell, came next day. We buried him this morning at Kensal Green, poor old gentleman. Thirty-three years he lived here, sir. bought him with the leasehe had only a bedroom-had all his meals at the club. That's all he had"-turning and pointing to a portmanteau, a bag, and a hat-box, lying together in the passage. "We're sending them on to Mr Blackwell's in in Leicestershire night." And he laughed a little, not unkindly, at the meagre show the battered old luggage made.

to

Well, I turned away with a shudder. It mustn't come to this with me. Yet how easily it might! Here was a man who, twenty years before, had orowds of friends, was welcome every where, had good looks, good breeding, to commend him-and yet it came to this, a hired bed and a hired nurse at the end. Where was the woman he had loved and lost, whose arm should have been round him, whose lips should have been on his tired forehead?

Perhaps she read it in 'The Times'-perhaps she missed it. She chose otherwise years ago, and he became a London clubman.

Now, surely in the country there would be less risk of such a dreary exit. Some kindly neighbour would know my house and know that I lived there, and would hear

that I was dying and come and see me. So the news would spread a little in my backwater, and the other denizens would surely come and ask about me, and perhaps come in and see me. And if I had a couple of servants they might attach themselves to me, and perhaps let my surviving relations, if I have any, knowand so on. Yes, the country is kinder then. It knows more than one wants it to know sometimes, but that makes for sympathy in the long-run, perhaps.

I took a small house in the hunting country where I was wont to go, and where my horses were standing, and I furnished it and rebuilt the stables and moved in.

This was all tolerably easy, and there is no trouble about managing stables and stable

men.

But my domestic troubles in the other department of my household were really rather overwhelming at first. All my female relatives had taken the deepest interest in the question of my establishment. It was quite clear I couldn't "keep house" myself-I didn't know tapioca from sago, and don't know it now-and I hadn't the remotest idea how many pounds of meat or butter "went to" each person in the establishment per week, nor could I remember it for twenty-four hours when I was told.

She

So when it was getting near the time for moving in, I went to an agency near my lodging and took the first woman they recommended to me. seemed a pleasant sort of person, and the agent said she had a good character, and she came. I wrote to each of my advisers, and said I hoped I had found just the person she had been so anxious for me to have; and I invited them all to come and stay with me later on and see for themselves.

I had to put off their visits. I had quite a good dinner the first evening I went down to my new house. Mrs Woolley had arrived earlier in the day. Before dinner she sent me a message through Clarke to say that there was no sherry to cook with. I didn't know one cooked with sherry, but Clarke said it was usual in "good

houses," so I sent him to the kitchen with a bottle, and he came back and said Maraschino would be necessary for the ice. So I sent Maraschino. My relations all said afterwards that was unwise. Anyhow, breakfast was very unpunctual next morning, and I had reason to complain of other matters, and Mrs Woolley left in tears, invoking alternate blessings and curses on me and my house, and escorted to the station by Clarke and my groom, who gave her a bottle of soda-water for her refreshment on the journey to her home and handed her ticket to the guard.

I dined for several nights at the mess it was on the outskirts of a garrison town I had settled-by the kindness of my military friends, or at my club in London. And then I found Kate Cleary. She was a "general." A poor fellow I knew had married on twopence a-year and no expectations, and his pretty little wife had died and left him stranded with a baby and a nurse and a small flat in Kensington and a "general." His mother took the baby and the nurse, and I took the general at his urgent request. He said she was a treasure, and had been one of the comforts of his short married life.

I don't know why, but my bachelor establishment didn't seem to suit her. She was Irish and a Roman Catholic, and I think Clarke must have aired some offensive heretical doctrines at tea the evening she came, or have spoken dis

respectfully of the Pope of Rome. She sent me up a beastly dinner, and I have a suspicion that Clarke made discourteous remarks about it when it became his supper in the kitchen later in the evening. Kate Cleary resigned the next day, and totally declined to stay even for the usual month. I dined out once or twice again, and then I went up to London for a day or two to think it over. And there I found Mrs Smith.

some

I was dining with friends of mine, and described my situation in such affecting terms to an old friend whom I had taken in to dinner, that she declared she must sacrifice something herself to help me, and that if I would like to have her housemaid, who had been with various members of her family, in various capacities, for years and years, and was an excellent cook, she felt sure I should never regret it.

She was quite frank about it all, and told me Mrs Smith had been with her and her family so long that they recognised their obligation to pension her before many years were past, and would certainly do it, whether she came to me or not, when the time arrived; that she was, however, still able and anxious to work, and that their only reason for wanting to part with the woman was that the rest of their household was banded together in arms against her, and the retreat of one side of the battle was necessary for the general peace and comfort. Obviously the retreat of the numerically