have to call his
attention to a board in the window, which in his concentration on the
sandals he had overlooked. It was a board giving the numbers (announced
that day) of the winning lottery tickets. None of these numbers coincided
with that owned by Mead.

The disappointment quite naturally led us to the refreshment room at the
station and kept us there until the hour of closing. The angry Mead in
some measure became reconciled to the injustice which he had suffered, and
we all enjoyed the friendliness of the waiters. These, not being over
busy, played the fool, except one who behind the bar sat with pen and
ink and a folio blank-book laboriously copying an English exercise on the
ancient pattern: Have you seen my glove?--Yes, I have seen your glove,
&c. One endeavoured to persuade us that he was a Russian, and feigned
a horrid interest in a news paragraph about Lenin. The other indulged in
an anti-French speech, with gestures. "La Liberte!" he jeered, at the same
time grasping vigorously in all directions.

Our nights were disturbed by mosquitoes, not so ferocious as formerly,
and cats. Aboard, it still seemed cold; but ashore there was little
breeze, and my walks round the town were warm work. The outskirts of this
ramshackle place were dreary, but I liked them better than city streets.
They formed a loose encampment of tin, or plaster, or matchboard, in
which one would perhaps notice most the open drains, the chickens, goats
(some of them of most sheepish appearance), cows, pigs, cats, dogs of
the silly sort, sunflowers, and gentlemen in blue cotton trousers, about
the thresholds. Grumble as you may at militarism, most army camps
would have been better favoured in some respects: since here, despite the
prospects of mud suggested by the dust of the present season, no hut
seemed to have a raised approach, whether stone causeway or duck-walk.
I never walked into Bahia Blanca, though not far short of its tall
spires, but found these habitations a sufficient view; the way back to
the _Bonadventure_ might be over a moorish level, thickly grown over
with yellow flowering weed, and all sorts of drouthy "flora of the
marsh." Marsh, however, it was not, the soil being thoroughly baked and
cracked. Here were a few birds, that seemed to me the thrushes of the
place; a few butterflies; beetles, lying dead here and there; lizards
in greater number. But the fields hereabouts had all a solitary look.
Often the track was inches d