_First Woman_: “Yes, he went to Buenos Ayres.”
_First Woman_: “Oh, he found that if you wanted to eat you had to work, just the same as here.”
_First Woman_: “And he felt dreadfully lonely so far away from all his people. Yes, he found that what was bad here is bad there, and so he made up his mind to come back here again.”
Among five thousand Gallegan peasants it would be difficult to find one who was not a proprietor--who did not own a little cottage and a little plot of ground. One result of this is that Socialists are also extremely rare in Galicia. In Andalusia, on the contrary, the land is all owned by a few rich landlords, and that province consequently swarms with Socialists. Many Italians also emigrate to South America, and there are spots there where the population is an equal mixture of Italians and Spaniards. This is particularly the case in Ecuador, where the mixture of the two peoples has already produced a new dialect, and the inhabitants are unconscious that the words they use are drawn from two languages. As I have said, in every town I visited in Galicia, without an exception, I saw notices on the street walls tempting the people to emigrate. During a drive from Noya to Santiago we passed on the road more than two hundred youths who had come down from the mountain villages to seek for work; each carried a hoe across his shoulder, and on it was slung a handkerchief containing his worldly goods. Here and there we saw a young man resting beneath some shady tree, a sort of Dick Whittington who, if he does not find work in Galicia, will emigrate, make a fortune, and perhaps return to buy ground and settle in Galicia, and become eventually a public benefactor to his native land. But, as a poor woman in the neighbourhood of Pontevedra told me, though they do make money quicker in South America than in Galicia, a large proportion of them suffer from the change of climate, and, what is more, they too often acquire the expensive habits and extravagant ways which counterbalance other advantages. “Many who have come back,” the woman told me, “say that, after all, there is no country in the world like Spain, for health and good climate and productiveness of the soil.”