He was but slightly bent and possessed the broad face and high cheek bones of the South American Indian. His skin was like parchment, and his eyes slanted peculiarly like the eyes of the Chinese. When Francisco had spoken of that last characteristic to his uncle he had been told that many people believed these Indians to be a tangent of the Oriental races, and upheld their theory mainly because of the peculiar similarity of the eyes.
José and Francisco were great friends and Francisco was much pleased that José was to be with them at the _estancia_, since his knowledge of animals, birds, herbs, in fact all out door life, was unlimited.
The car they occupied was a compartment car of the English type, although the ponderous engine was North American. As the railroads of Argentina are mainly under English control the English railway customs and equipments are largely in evidence.
The pretty stations at each suburb are surrounded by grass plots with beds of flowers, and the English system of overhead bridges across the tracks at all stations reduces the number of accidents.
Francisco found out all of this by a series of continuous questions as their train sped through the pretty suburbs with their numbers of summer homes, surrounded by well kept gardens. The villages began to grow fewer and fewer and Colonel Lacevera said:
"Now it's my turn, Niño! Can you bound the Argentine Republic?"
Francisco began in the sing-song manner of the Spanish schools:--"On the north by Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, on the west and south by Chile; on the east by Brazil, Uruguay and the Atlantic Ocean. Its area is one million, one hundred and eighteen thousand square miles and its population is over six million. It is--"
"There! There!" exclaimed his uncle, laughingly. "You may stop. No telling how long you could sing the praises of your native land. I want to tell you a few things that you may not have learned. Do you know what alluvial soil is?"
"It sounds like some metal," ventured the boy.
"But it isn't. You see, Argentina was once part of the ocean bed; for under the soil, way back in the interior of the country, I, myself, have found shells and gravel. This long level stretch of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the foothills of the Andes, that was once covered with water, is now called the Pampas; and you are now in that region.