There were hundreds of gauchos, the real article, with skins like leather, eyes as black as night, and most of them were on ponies and astride Spanish saddles, and they were picturesquely garbed, but not so picturesquely as you see them in coloured illustrations. They were noisy, and prancing their horses about and challenging each other. They had ridden in fifteen and twenty miles, some of them, and their women had driven in the carts with provisions for the day. The women had little encampments in the bushes, and fires burning, and they made coffee and served their lords with chunks of food. The men are all laughing and arguing the merits of their ponies. Nearly everybody is mounted. One gaucho is jumping from group to group, waving two paper pesos (about 3s. 4d.) and demanding who will lay two pesos against his pony. The jabber is interminable. He gets taken. Excitement runs through the crowd. The competitors each hand the money to an old fellow who stands on a rickety platform which serves as judges' box. Then they amble off toward a tree where they are their own starters. A native policeman frantically yells for the course to be cleared. Some sort of passage-way is made, and then there is the customary confounded dog which will not get out of the way. Here they come, and in a pelt of dust. They ride well and with a loose rein. The riders swing their arms and yell as though they would frighten their steeds to greater efforts. You can feel the quiver in the crowd. By go the horses, running neck to neck. But one has won by a nose. The winner trots up smiling, and he gets the four pesos held by the judge. But the clamour has begun again. One man, rather a gaudy buck and with a fine horse, challenges the world. He will race any man for five pesos, and he has the money in his hand to show he means business. Well, he will lay his five pesos to anybody else's four. Everybody is talking about his own horse, or somebody else's horse, or egging two enthusiasts to cease their talking and have the thing settled by a race. These gauchos belong to a long line of men who have lived on their prairies and had to do with horses ever since the Spaniards first landed. They go to horse-races not for a pleasant holiday, but because the fever of horse-racing is in their veins. And that night after dinner we sat in the great light of the veranda, and the mighty purple night was beyond, and the air was heavy with the musk which rises from the plains after a hot day and the great locusts which swerved toward us! Some women gave little screams in fear they might get amongst their hair. Men who knew their harmlessness--except when there was a crop of young wheat to be devoured--caught them in their hands. [Illustration: _Photograph by A. W. Boote & Co., Buenos Aires._ A TYPICAL HOUSE IN CORDOBA PROVINCE.]