amp, so that of the
town side of the question I cannot speak.

I have been three years in the province of Cordoba, and all the servants
I have met with except one were Argentines from the foothills of the
Cordoba Sierras.

They were without exception quite untrained as far as the English idea
goes, and the first thing to do with them was usually to teach them the
primitive ideas of cleanliness. The first servant I had was an ancient
female named Andrea, about forty years old, and it proved quite
impossible to get her to see the necessity of keeping anything in the
kitchen clean, as she seemed imbued with the idea that it was great
waste of time washing saucepans and frying-pans, as they would only get
dirty again when next used, and the most she could be persuaded to do
was to rub them round inside with a bit of old newspaper or a handful of
grass. Needless to say, after a time I got tired of these methods, and
so we parted.

My next servant, Angelina, was one of the best I had, as she was clean,
which was a great consideration, and also she was quick to learn and
soon picked up the rudiments of cooking according to our ideas; her
great failing, however, was that she was anything but honest, and could
not refrain from petty pilfering; and another drawback to her was her
objection to wearing shoes or stockings in the hot weather; in spite of
being constantly told that she must not appear without them, she would
insist in doing so, and this was a continual cause of trouble.

After getting rid of No. 2 our real troubles began, and we had eight
changes in ten months. At the time we were living in wooden huts about
two miles from a village which was a summer resort for rich people from
Buenos Aires, and this caused a dearth of servants during the summer
months, as the place was full from the beginning of December to the end
of March, and people who came up for the summer and rented houses
usually were willing to pay anything to get servants, with the result
that we outside would get none, or only the cast-off ones. Nos. 3 and 4
stayed but a short time. My fifth attempt was a terrible girl, too dirty
for words; and though apparently willing to learn, too utterly lacking
in intelligence to ever learn anything. She used to get herself into the
most awful grimy condition, and one incident during her time with me is
worth mentioning. I had with great difficulty one day got her to
understand that a wood floor could not be prop