Sometimes we travelled from point to point during the night; sometimes we camped, as it were, at a little wayside station, with the silence of the plains around us except when a great goods train went roaring by. We kept up the joke about "roughing it." After a dinner party, when the coffee and liqueurs were on the table, and the sitting-room was pouring billows of cigar smoke from the wide-open windows, we leaned back in our big chairs and hoped that other poor devils who were "roughing it" in the wilds were having no worse a time than we were. Of course, the passenger traffic--except around Buenos Aires--is a secondary consideration compared with agricultural produce. It is estimated that the area of land suitable for agriculture but not yet cultivated is 290,000,000 acres, really all beyond the zone of railway influence. At a greater distance than fifteen miles from a railway station the cartage of the produce becomes so expensive and difficult that the profit disappears. Information supplied me by the Argentine Agricultural Society shows that the average cost of cartage is 0.70d. per mile per cwt. Therefore, whoever has his farm farther than fifteen miles from a station has to pay 10d. per cwt. for cartage. Lands lying within the agricultural zone, but distant more than fifteen miles from a railway station, lose enormously in value, as they cannot be utilised except for live stock. To find a means of facilitating and cheapening the transport of cereals would be to double the production and value of the lands. The Agricultural Society thinks the solution may lie in the construction of cheap auxiliary lines of the simplest kind, which, laid down parallel to the principal lines at a distance of nineteen to twenty-two miles, or at right angles to them, would hand over to cultivation considerable zones of valuable fertile lands, and concentrate the produce in the loading stations at a fair cost to the farmers. The question is well asked, if the 20,000 miles of rails are only sufficient to permit the cultivation of 70,000,000 acres, how many will be necessary when nearly 300,000,000 more acres are being worked? At present about 1,000 miles of fresh railroad are being laid down each year. £20,000,000 a year is being put into new railroad construction. Yet thirty years ago (1884) the total amount invested in Argentine railways--now running into hundreds of millions--was only £18,600,000. In 1885 all the railways in the Republic transported cargo amounting to a little over 3,000,000 tons. In 1905 it was over 12,500,000 tons. In 1913 it was moving toward 40,000,000 tons.