The outdoor café life is not as well known, so narrow are the streets; even Calle Florida, which is the essentially fashionable shopping street of the central town, is lamentably narrow. With the exception of the Avenida de Mayo, which runs from the plaza containing the Cathedral and President’s palace to the new chambers of Congress, and divides the city into its northern and southern sections, and the Avenida Alvear, which leads from the main part of the city to Palermo Park, flanked with costly homes and interspersed with gardens and plazas that lend a wealth of verdure and flowers to the broad avenue, the streets are so narrow that in the business section vehicles are required by city ordinances to move in the same direction, down one street and up the next. But in this splendid, stately Avenida de Mayo of hers, which, except in appearance, has the characteristics of the business part of New York’s Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to the Park, Buenos Aires has a thoroughfare that rivals Rio’s Avenida Central in beauty, and, with its finer hotels and cafés and French architecture, possesses even more of the attractions of a Parisian boulevard. Buenos Aires is not a city that calls for the usual precautions taken by travelers. All the creature comforts may be had here, although, it must be confessed, at a cost greatly in excess of prices familiar to North Americans. There are good physicians and dentists, and no less than sixteen hospitals—one of which, the British Hospital, is a magnificently equipped institution, and the one patronized by the American colony. There are electric street cars (which carried 125,000,000 passengers last year), splendid trains that carry passengers in thoroughly modern and well-served coaches to almost every part of the settled country, first-class carriages, taxicabs, hotels, department stores, and shops of every description. II Leaving the capital for a general tour through Argentina, the visitor will soon come to appreciate the _Porteño’s_ division of the republic into the two parts: Buenos Aires and _El Campo_. For the greater part, the Camp is a vast plain, covering five hundred million acres of flat, fertile soil, with scarcely a natural hillock higher than those thrown up by the ants, and no depression more marked than those which the cartwheels have plowed—stretching from horizon to horizon, north, west, and south—vast, silent, and awe-inspiring in the majesty of its enormous extent and productiveness—the calm, inexhaustible bosom which suckles the prodigious infant on the Plata.