True, it is not in South American human nature to be puritanical but the lower classes in Argentina and Uruguay are but non-moral, to use a somewhat fashionable term, with the non-morality of grown-up children, which they are. They have not the faintest idea of the vice which abounds in the great cities of the Northern Hemisphere. Montevideo is more staid than cosmopolitan Buenos Aires; even at Carnival time the former City seems to take its merrymaking seriously. Any real vice which can be found in either Capital is an imported article. If among the lower classes of both countries the whole advantages of the marriage ceremony seem not to be duly appreciated, this is due, in the vast majority of cases, to motives of economy. A religious marriage service is a costly item in the equipment of a young couple, and a purely civil ceremony is even less favourably looked on by neighbours than a postponement of any ceremony at all. Later, such couples usually do marry with due pomp and circumstance, including the invitation of all and sundry to the humble wedding feast. After that, all is in order in the case of the death of the husband and father; for marriage legitimatizes previously born children. Indeed, the writer was once present at a _fiesta_ in a rural district, not forty minutes’ run by train from the City of Buenos Aires, organized to honour the occasion of the visit of a Priest who in a very short space of time married the parents and christened a whole batch of their children. An old custom still chiefly prevailing among the humbler classes, both urban and rural, is one which may be called the “waking” of the dead. The news of a bereavement spreads quickly among neighbours; who do not wait to be invited but arrive, in groups organized extemporaneously by themselves, at the house of mourning. There, one of such groups succeeds another, and so on throughout the night after a death; sitting silently and only moving to partake of the necessary refreshment provided in view of their sure coming. As in most other countries where modernity has not yet suppressed all local colour with its neutral tints, the lower classes in both Argentina and Uruguay are much the most interesting. The free-and-easy Bohemian sort of life in a _conventillo_[16] is curious. In each of its many rooms lives a family, while the court is common to all for cooking (a charcoal brazier usually stands at the side of each door), washing of clothes and, last but not least, the discussion of _mate_ and gossip. All sorts of people dwell in a single conventillo, artisans, hawkers, washerwomen, milliners, factory hands, poor employees, etc. etc., and all group themselves in the common courtyard of an evening when work is done, frequently to the music of a guitar.