In the pink hotel I found a well-dressed young man who was glad to see all strangers, and particularly one who wrote for a newspaper. He accepted an invitation to take a cup of coffee, and when I asked him if he was acquainted with the region he said he had been just at the point of asking me if I would be interested in hearing something about it. Then the coffee came, and with it a Dutchess County, N. Y., brand of condensed milk, and a blue-print map. We combined the milk and coffee, and then spread out the map and weighted the corners with our cups, the coffee pot, and the milk can. Being thus ready for business, the young man pointed at the map. It was the plan of a great city--a city with plazas connected by wide avenues and boulevards, with streets running at right angles between. Figures and letters scattered here and there on it showed sites for Government and other important buildings, while long broken lines showed the location of many street railways. The young man explained the peculiarities and advantages of the disposition of plazas and boulevards and street car lines, and eventually, from the lay of the land, I grasped the situation. This was the plan of the city of Santa Cruz, the great Patagonian metropolis that was to grow up right there in the valley, where now one could see nine houses all told, of which two were unoccupied. It would grow just as surely as the sun would set behind Weddell Bluff, to quote the words of the young man; and then he went on, in a way to make even a Kansas town-site boomer rub his eyes, to tell of the shipments of wool "aggregating 2,000,000 pounds last year," of the good pasture to be had "at L3 per square league annual rental," of the "traces of gold found on Lake Argentine, where good mineral developments will be made," of the "experiments in wheat culture to be made, which will doubtless succeed." All of this was said to show that I had arrived at just the right time to get in on the ground floor of a great real estate deal. I did not need to buy the lots. I could have all I would build on free of cost, save for the usual charges of making out and recording the papers. I have frequently heard men who had done business with Spanish-American nations talk despairingly of the lack of enterprise to be found there. They speak of the depreciated currency there as "adobe money," and call the nations "the land of _poco tiempo_" and "the manana country." As to many of these nations the terms are well applied, but the Argentine must be excepted. Neither in the suburbs of Brooklyn, nor on the plains of Oklahoma, nor among the orange groves of California have I seen a boomer who could tell his story in better form than the young man with a blue-print map of the future metropolis of Patagonia.