This far southern region of South America is shared by the British Empire, in its distant outpost of the Falkland Isles, forming its most southerly colony. The latitude here in the south corresponds roughly to that of England in the north, but climate is very different, with a constantly overcast and rainy sky, although the extremes of heat and cold are far less. The treeless, grass-covered lands maintain large numbers of sheep. The little capital of Stanley is mainly built of wood, with a Government House of grey stone, calling to mind an Orkney or Shetland manse. There is nothing of Spanish American atmosphere here. Far from the mainland, the only association with the continent of South America of the Falkland Isles is that they are the headquarters of the bishop of that diocese, which, as we have seen elsewhere, covers so wide a field in Spanish America, and perhaps the fact that Argentina still regards the possession of these somewhat melancholy and remote sea-girt isles by Britain with disapproval; claiming them as hers. The name is immortal in the destruction of the German fleet in those waters during the Great War. FOOTNOTES: [37] Pronounced, phonetically, "Who-Who-e," with the accent on the last syllable. [38] _Paraguay_, Koebel, South American Series. [39] _Paraguay_, op. cit. [40] _Patagonia_, Hesketh Prichard, London 1911. CHAPTER XV TRADE AND FINANCE There is a certain element of interest, apart from money-making, attaching to commerce with that wide and varied group of peoples which come under the distinctive nomenclature of the Latin American Republics, and this is perhaps a fortunate circumstance. There is, as already remarked, an element of adventure about trade operations therewith which may be said to stimulate and assist enterprise--the enterprise of buying and selling in those remote and still half-developed communities. Your merchant packs and dispatches his wares, marking his packages with names and destinations whose lettering and pronunciation, though they may cost him an effort to write or speak correctly, have in them something redolent of the blue seas and skies of the Tropics, upon whose shores they will presently be landed, to be handed over--the attentions of cigarette-smoking and gold-laced Customs officers satisfied amid much Castilian _chárla_--to the mercies in many cases of rude but patient muleteers, when, bound on the backs of mules they will be borne over mountain paths and through tangled jungles to many a distant interior village of the Pampas or the Cordillera.