Attending to cattle is not hard work in the sense that ditch digging is hard, but a cowboy's life is not one of ease in either North or South America. The home life of the gaucho of the pampas can be duplicated on the plains of New Mexico. The walls of his house are almost invariably sun-dried blocks of mud, and the roof is a flat layer of mud over brush, supported on the crooked trunks of willow trees usually found in the valleys of streams. For the roof, a thatch of the long pampa grass is also common. This is much better, because it is tight until it rots. The mud roof leaks in time of rain so badly that the family moves out of doors. Fact! The floor is the earth as the builder found it. There may be two or three rooms, but one usually suffices. Here the gaucho and his family, and his mother or his wife's mother, and a sister or two pass their lives. A few skins of cattle and panthers and deer will serve for a bed when a blanket has been thrown over them. A brazier may sometimes be found, and on this water is boiled to make _mate_. The food--meat of various kinds only--will be boiled and roasted over the open fire built without or under a simple shelter in the wet season. There is often no table, and chairs are scarce. The food, if served on a table, is simply heaped up on a platter or dish of some kind, and each one makes a grab at the heap. As often as otherwise each helps himself from the pot or the roast as it hangs over the fire. One jabs his fork into a convenient spot of the roast--forks are common on the pampas--and with a clever stroke of his big sheath knife cuts off a slab of meat. One end of the slab is flipped into the mouth when an upward stroke of the knife divides the slab, leaving a fairly convenient piece in the mouth. Watching a family of eight or ten--men, women, and children--squatting around a fire, simultaneously flipping the ends of slabs of meat into their mouths, and with upward strokes of keen-edged knives cutting away the slabs and leaving the mouth full of the steaming roast, the whole group talking and laughing continually, meantime--that is one of the most interesting, if not the most pleasing, experiences of a journey in the Argentine Republic. The traveller who visits a gaucho family must needs join in the feast, following the fashion of his host, and it is a fact that more than one tenderfoot has sliced off the tip of his nose in an effort to cut off his mouthful of meat only. In his social and home life the gaucho is, as one would expect from what has been said, an affectionate husband and father for the most of the time, with occasional outbursts of temper when he treats those dependent on him with great cruelty. Dancing is the favorite amusement of the sexes when together, and the gaucho is then--and at every opportunity, in fact--a most persistent gallant, and a successful one, too.