Joking apart, however, the share ring in the Buenos Aires Temple of Mammon were best avoided by the uninitiate. In this ring there is always one, sometimes two (its strength does not run to more), media of pure speculation in course of manipulation by one speculative group or another. The names or nature of these media do not really seem to matter. They vary. Sometimes they may be the shares of the Dock Company of an inchoate Port, sometimes those of an Industrial Company with vague expectations. Indeed, vagueness which may be tinged by rumour and imagination with a hue dimly resembling that of impending rich surprise is almost essential to the initiation of this kind of gamble. The shares are bulled out of all proportion to their even possible value for a little while and then no more is heard of them; and other very similar ones reign in their stead in the sensational place on the blackboard, on which all bargains during each day are chalked up as they are called out by the parties making them. The end of these really stillborn booms is mystery. Who are the unfortunate last in? Strangers, doubtless, when there are any. But if there be none, as is the case more frequently than not? One hears vague talk of Paris and other European capitals and then silence for ever more. Anyhow, the stranger, for whom this book is chiefly written, would, if he took a hand in any one of these games, soon find out that though he might see the price of the shares he had purchased mounting gaily up on the blackboard like mercury in the tropics he could never realize to any appreciable extent. Did he start to sell, then all the weak little bulls of whom his co-speculators would be composed, people to whom ten dollars a day one way or the other makes all the difference in their domestic budget, would rush to sell also out of sheer fright, and down would go the market on him like a guillotine. At the finish he would be left with a very large proportion of his probably not over-valuable holding; of which he would have little further news than notices regarding proposed reconstruction schemes, etc. It must not, however, be imagined that the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange is by any means exclusively devoted to such work as that just indicated. On the contrary, many Bank and Industrial shares are also quoted and the other, the Securities, ring is just as genuinely serious as the gambling part of the share ring is meretricious. The chief securities dealt in in the former are the Bonds of the National _Cedulas_, as “gilt edged” a security as could well be wished for. These Cedulas are Bonds issued by the National Hypothecary Bank, an Institution of the National Government, as against mortgages of freehold property in the Republic; the method of their issue being, shortly, as follows. An intending Mortgagor lodges a proposal with the Bank; on which his title is examined and the property offered valued by Government experts appointed for each purpose.