Thus the first board is mostly filled with records of the numbers and prices of National Cedulas dealt in, and the second with those of whatever one or two kinds of shares may for the time being be in fashion for what one may bluntly call gambling. For gambling, simply, is the end of almost everything in the shape of speculation in the ephemerally chosen media. It is in regard to this gambling that the note of warning to the stranger already sounded may be repeated here. The really Argentine public has long ago had its fingers sufficiently often and severely burnt to have decided to give all Bolza speculation a wide berth. And here one is brought face to face with a mystery which the present writer has as yet been wholly unable to explain in any fully satisfactory way. This mystery is that, given the fact that the contributions of the public to Bolza gambling have since long ago become a negligible quantity, it seems clear that such speculation must be confined to a limited group of Bolza operators. How, therefore, is it worth the while of any of these operators to survive for long as such? They are mostly, if not all, men of small capital, very small in many cases, yet there they are, day after day, busily occupied in attributing usually fictitious values to the shares of one, or at most two (for the time being) companies. Up go the prices of such shares, rising each day to giddier heights, till at last like balloons they disappear from sight and another set of shares takes their place as material for a boom. Who is the last man or men left with shares at top price? And what on earth does he do with them? These be questions the answers to which are hidden by a secrecy the completeness and continuity of which do credit to the initiate few whose common interest it is to maintain it.