Taking the night boat at Buenos Aires, one arrives in Montevideo in the early morning after a pleasant ride of just a hundred miles diagonally across the river, and is immediately impressed with the picturesqueness of El Cerro, an ancient fortress that still poses as the guardian of the entrance of the river. Much more important to-day, however, is the lighthouse that rises from this height. Entering the port the visitor comes upon a modern city of almost four hundred thousand inhabitants, possessed of all the attributes of the present-day metropolis; an adequate and up-to-date system of docks, fine business blocks, public buildings, plazas, boulevards, and broad streets laid out on the checkerboard scheme, sewer, water, and lighting systems, and extensive and well-managed electric tramway lines. To the Buenos Airean, naturally enough, Montevideo is a second Brooklyn, for the “ferry” trip of a hundred miles is not incongruous where people think in superlatives. Here the Buenos Airean may come, after a period of consuming activity in his own more closely built city, for rest and soul expansion among the leisurely and dignified Montevideans, and, at the expense of his neighbor, even permit himself a bit of friendly chaff in which he might venture to use the word “soporific.” The Montevidean by no means resents the imputation. There is no resentment because, although a restful atmosphere does pervade the city, there is not the slightest taint of stagnation. The Montevidean is conscious that his sturdy, vigorous, and even bellicose race has built up a nation unique in South America in its promise of material prosperity; that his country is among the richest in the quality and varied productiveness of its soil of any on the continent, and that his city, housing a third of the country’s population, is the pivot of the nation’s astonishing commercial activity and one of the most healthful and delightful residence cities in the world. Montevideo was founded in 1726, but remained a comparatively unimportant way station until some thirty years ago, when it began to imbibe the modernism of its big rivals in Brazil and Argentina. To-day it is almost as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires, the Italian element predominating among the foreigners, with the British preëminent as investors of capital, as in the latter city. To the superb Solis Theater come all the European companies that appear in Buenos Aires; club life is best represented in the Club Uruguay and the English Club, situated on opposite sides of the Plaza Matriz; and afternoon tea has come to be an important feature of the social life, several tea houses being now distributed over the leisure sections of the city.