Argentina, as it is known to travel, commerce and history, is the Argentina of the Pampa. Herein lies its civilization, its great towns, its railway network, the things by which it lives. The Pampa is a vast storehouse of food, and in some respects it does not lack beauty. Much of it is a dead level, but it has its elevations (both materially and metaphorically). It has, too, its great scourges of Nature, in the droughts which at times have ruined its industries, and which must inevitably have their periods of visitation; in the other plagues, as of the devastating locust, for which doubtless science will produce remedy or extirpation. The tempestuous winds which blow across it are at times another scourge, and the dust storms may often cause the dweller to ask whether the plagues of Egypt shall still be visited upon it! As to the droughts, we do not know if these are not extending, just as it may be that the snowfields of the Andes are diminishing, as if threatening some slow drying-up of the fountains of heaven here. The early folk of these great plains were not of a meek and humble character, such as the Spaniards so often encountered. They were _Indios bravos_; fighters and stubborn savages, implacably hostile. Nevertheless, they gave way in time, as destiny had decreed they should. [Illustration: THE PAMPAS, ARGENTINA. Vol. II. To face p. 204.] Perhaps the things of the animal world, in its commercial sense, might be taken as most remarkable here. From few mares and stallions brought in by the men of Spain, vast equine droves, half wild, appeared with marvellous rapidity, and the later breeds multiplied similarly. It was a horseless land before the white man came. To-day a horseman pursuing his way over the vast plain is a very prominent object against the skyline. There was no ox or cow, but to-day the teeming herds in their millions--though not unnumbered--have built, through commerce, through the products of their hides and bodies, the palaces and boulevards of Buenos Ayres and its sister cities, the homes of the millionaires of this new American nation; a land where the progenitors of both man and beast first humbly crossed from old Europe, and now pour forth their riches thereto.