The advent of a prosperity, however, that now seems more definite than ever before has produced a similar effect upon household expenditure as in the neighbouring countries. The cost of living has risen by leaps and bounds during the past two or three years--a fact that salaried foreigners resident in the country have found out to their somewhat acute inconvenience. In the Campo, naturally enough, this phenomenon of ways and means has not occurred. When live stock and acres are numbered only by the thousand such annoying matters as house-rent and the butcher's bill fail to carry any significance. Nevertheless, in Montevideo the former has practically doubled itself within the last half-dozen years, and all similar items have followed suit as a matter of course. But the rise in the price of land signifies prosperity, and is at all events welcome enough to those directly interested in the soil. South America, taken as a whole, is a continent whose inhabitants are not a little addicted to ostentation. The phase is natural enough in view of the conditions that obtain in so many of the Republics. In the case of the pastoral countries, even in quite modern times the broad lands had lain comparatively valueless until the introduction of the freezing process for meat and the opening up of the great wheat and maize areas sent up the price of the soil by leaps and bounds. Yet even prior to this era a certain amount of prosperity had prevailed, and young South Americans had become accustomed up to a certain point to wend their way for educational purposes to France and to England, and thus to assimilate European ideas with those that prevailed at the time in the republics of the south. The sudden advent of overflowing wealth thus found them to a great extent prepared to introduce the most high-flown of modern ideas into the life of their own country. No doubt the very consciousness of these riches that, head for head, undoubtedly far surpass that of the dwellers in the old continent, caused the South Americans to fling aside the last vestige of pastoral simplicity and to make the roots of this great wealth of theirs bud out into residential palaces and entertainments of a rather fabulous order. Since they had shown clearly enough that their material gains had surpassed those of Europe, what more natural than that they should endeavour to prove with equal conclusiveness their ability to outshine the continent of their ancestors in the ornamentation and luxuries that follow automatically in the footsteps of fortune! Surely the trait is nothing beyond the proof of a healthy rivalry.