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There is something pathetic in the songs of these errant Gouchors, whose homes were their saddles, and whose estancias were the plains. They recall the days of Gumez, and his free, wild horsemen, and the romances of a picturesque but tragic barbarism that is forever gone. The water carrier listens at the veranda as he hears the guitar attuned to these themes as the North American lad would do at a tale of Marion's men. The patriots of the plains of the Silver-land who breathed liberty in the

MAGDALENA GUERMES DE TEJADA, Gouchor Minstrel,

air is a theme that must ever haunt the growing republics of the Sun.

South America has glorious singers and songs, but the greater are to come. The countries of the South temperate zone are pulsing with literary activity and expectation, and Aconcagua is a new Parnassus, and is likely to be the last in the West.

Poets came in brotherhoods at the dawn of the new era, as prophetic heralds, and as inspired and inspiring leaders, and, again, in the decline of an epoch they appear as raconteurs. The poets of the dawn have already appeared in the ten republics of the Andes, and have sung the songs of liberty and love, of the wide pampas, the majestic rivers and groves, and the orchid haunted plateaux. In the faded and gone incarial days poets sprung into the life and inspirations of the golden temples of the Children of the Sun. There was the most poetic race of Indian civilizations. The land of poetry was there, and is there. The end of the long march of the Aryan people toward the West must come in Argentine, Chili and Peru. The Italian emigration to this new Italy is one of art. The mixed race of Argentines, Chilians, Peruvians, Italians, English,

French and German is making a new nation, and beautiful Buenos Ayres and Santiago show what that nation will be. The development of the United States has been the wonder of the nineteenth century. The surprise and glory of the twentieth century is likely to be the achievement of the republics of the sun and of the Southern Cross, of which the poets are already singing and are more gloriously to sing in the supreme century before us.

South America loves to sing of her heroes of the liberation. There is Andean like air in the chorus of her song to Bolivar (El Libertador).

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Compatriots, the day is at hand,

The day great Bolivar was born,

The Alcides new, the tyrant's terror,
America's love and glory."

"Dulce Patria" the national song of Chili, the vow in which is sometimes sung by the army kneeling, has lines as inspiring:

"The strife and the warfare is ended,

And we hear the glad rejoicing of the free!
He who yesterday was our invader,

Can no longer a brother be.

On the field now our banners are gleaming,
Three centuries of stain thus redeeming !
And at last we are free and victorious-

Here in gladness our triumph revealing!
For the heritage of heroes is Freedom,
At whose feet sweet victory is kneeling!
CEORUS.

Land beloved! Our vow now receive,

Vows which Chili upon thine altar swore;
She shall be the grave of free men,

Or th' asylum 'gainst tyrants evermore!
The national air of Brazil opens as nobly:
"May the glorious sun shed a flood of light
O'er Brazil with its hallowed sod.
Despots never again will our land affright-

Never more will we groan 'neath the rod.
Then with hymns of glory resounding,

With new hopes for the land we adore,
Loyal hearts for our country rebounding,
Let our song ring from mountain to shore.
CHORUS.

Liberty Liberty!

Open wide your pinions grand;
Thro' tempest dire and battles' fire,
Oh, guard our native land. "

This was the hymn of the Proclamation of the Republic, and the words were by Medeiros e Albu querque.

O my country

Sooner than see thee bound again

In slavery's chain, I'd give my life for thee.

The last poems written before his pitiable end have a Shelley-like sadness:

My mother who is livng yet,
Since I myself am living,
Cradled me in her arms
In hours of hope and bliss.
My father, in infinite love
Gave me his caresses.

Since those hours

Three and twenty years have passed away, My home has vanished from my eyes

And she who holds Heaven in her arms The mother of my love

Wakes me no longer in the morning.

Farewell, for the last time,

Love of my love,

Light of my shadows,

Soul of my flowers,

My youth, my lyre, Farewell.

If Sarmiento did not write verse, his prose is poetry. His "Fecunda " translated by Mrs. Horace Mann under the title of "Life in the Argentine " reads like an epic. The first President of Argentine, Rivadaiva, was a literary man. The two literary presidents, Sarmiento and Rivadavia, were agreed on the educational problem of their times. The primary school," said Sarmiento, "is the foundation of national character," and Rivadavia - "La escuela es el secreto de la prosperidad de los pueblos uncientes" (the United States).

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The bazars of the Argentine cities abound with the poems or love songs of "the Gouchors," or the wander. ing minstrels of the pampas. These native singers improvised music to the guitar. There was much poetry in the gypsy life of

an epic poem. He would have been included in "Plutarch's Lives," had he lived in the early heroic age. After achieving the independence of Argentina, he was offered the supreme direction of the affairs of the Purple Republic, but he answered, I did not fight for place." After the battle of Maypu, Chili would have presented to him ten thousand ounces of gold, but he replied: "I did not draw the sword for gain." Peru tendered to him the crown of the old incarial plateaux, but he said: The presence of a fortunate general in the country where he has won victories is detrimental to the state; I have achieved the independence of Peru; I have ceased to be a public man." His motto was: "Thou must be that which thou oughtest to be, else thou shalt be nothing." After his memorable interview with Bolivar, on that poettuned night under the fiery arch of the equator, when he entrusted his affairs of the republics of the south temperate zone to the Emancipator's hands, he prepared to exile himself from his native land, for the peace of the liberated people. He sailed for France, and there and in Belgium lived in poverty for many years. His body was brought back to Buenos Ayres, where it was virtually crowned dead, at a funeral such as the world has seldom seen.

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STATUE OF SIMON BOLIVAR, Lima, Peru.

these wanderers, a sense of the sublime and beautiful in nature and free existence, and their collected songs will one day have their picturesque suggestions for the artist. That the semi-barbarous Gouchors should produce poets is in itself an illustration of the universality of the divine gift, which the work of Echeverria has illustrated to the world.

Some of the noblest of the patriotic poems of Argentina are dedicated to the memory of San Martin, the greatest of Creoles, the liberator of Argentina, Chili and Peru. This hero

merits

Simon Bolivar and San Martin had the qualities of epic heroes, and their achievements will doubtless furnish inspirations for literary art that will be worthy of the Andean peaks and plains. South America not only promises to be the new poet's land, but one where the epic strain will follow the present prophetic period of reed and song.

BY CHARLES D. LANIER.

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only to surely and mysteriously disappear in the twelfth, vanishing and reappearing without giving a suspicion of the details of the hiatus, until accidentally detected in his joyous recourse to a camp fire and stolen roasting ears.

The whole world seems to be feeling some such impulse just now. There is an open air movement almost revolutionary in its degree and which cannot by any means be accounted for by any theories of a more numerous leisurely class. People are bicycling, yachting, running, jumping, fishing, hunting, playing baseball, tennis and golf, to an extent which is new in this generation. Nor is any considerable fraction of these people of the class whose wealth makes some such diversion inevitable; they are the workers in stores and offices of the great cities; typewriters, elevator boys, barbers, physicians, lawyers and clergymen-in short, "the people." If it be true that the times are too strenuous, that Americans are a nation of dyspeptics because they work too hard and take too little physical exercise, the signs of 1896 are very promising of better things.

But if there were no fresh awakening of interest in any but one of these sports, and if there were only the bicycle as a new factor in our life, it would still amount to a revo lution in mores. It would be weak to heap bicycle statistics on the heads of readers who have each day a procession of

evidence on every smoothly paved street that the world is awheel It is literally true that the burden of proof is on every man, woman and child to show what physical or financial disability prevents him or her from owning and using a bicycle, and the conventional subject of the weather has been totally cashiered in favor of comparative bicycle notes. The bicycle and its advantages present every opportunity for universality of interest. One does not have to be an athlete to ride a bicycle, but can partake on a wheel of the delights usually restricted to athletes; after the initial cost, the wheel is marvelously inexpensive, even without counting on the credit side the gains to health; above all, it can be used with charming results at a moment's notice, if one have only a half hour between the closing of the office and dinner; and is at home alike on the city street and the country road.

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The

It would be interesting to know what increase the bicycle has brought in the proportion of people who take regular exercise of any account; but without any data one can easily see the percentage must run up into figures of many hundreds. consequence is a gain to the race at large of incalculable value. An eminent physician says that no one thing has so benefited mankind within two hundred years as the invention of the bicycle, and that the millions of people now using wheels are not only "reaping the benefits themselves, but are preparing the way for future generations which will be born of healthy parents." The busiest physicians have found it necessary to learn to ride in order to understand the needs and queries of their patients, and since the number of the riders is so great that a tremendous majority must be of a class who find it necessary to use discretion in their wheeling indulgences, it has come about after the first flurries of learning that the methods of riding and construction of the machines have generally been

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"LIFE'S" PROPHECY OF COMING ANCESTRAL PORTRAITS.

governed closely and wisely by the demands of health and symmetrical muscular development.

Nowadays the world may easily be divided into people who wheel and people who do not, and the former class seem to hold the balance of power, possessing as they do the solidarity due to this single enthusiasm. The bicycle has become a power in economics and politics. Its association, the League of American Wheelmen, successfully fights the great railroads and is hearkened to by municipal and state legislatures. When the wheelmen of Chicago wanted to visit a far western meet they insisted that their fares should be at one half price,

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and the railroads were
terrorized into submis-
sion by the threat of
having 150,000 wheel-
men solidly arrayed
against them. The
transportation lines in
many states have been
forced to do away with
express charges on bi-
cycles and treat them
as checkable baggage.
In several localities the
local bicycle associa-
tions have decided that
owners of wheels
ought to be generally
taxed $1 a head for the
sake of obtaining bet-
ter cycling roads, and

forthwith the legislative powers bowed before them.
In the New York City streets sprinkling carts made
uncomfortable riding, and an ordinance was at once
obtained obliging the water cart drivers to leave
a strip of unsprinkled asphalt three feet wide next
to each curbing. Legislators are busy with expert
testimony on the question of the danger of carrying
The League
small children on bicycle handle bars.
of American Wheelmen is an institution which any
Presidential candidate would be loath to offend.

The manufacture of these machines that are spinning noiselessly over every road that offers a respectable track has brought into profitable investment so many million dollars and so many thousand workmen that a statement of the figures would go far beyond the point where the mind is able to grasp the magnitude of the situation. But there is an economic conservation of energy in analogy with the physical law. The wealth of bicycle labor and manufacture has not been gained without corresponding losses, and there is a fresh surprise each day in the reports from tradesmen who have suf fered by this tremendous diversion of enthusiasm and consumption. With the confectioner and the barkeeper and the tobacco manufacturer we cannot have more than a personal sympathy. average philosophic citizen is willing to hear that 700,000,000 cigars that were smoked last year will

The

be saved in 1896, and
will be satisfied with
the sight of gaily spin-
ning wheelmen who
are opening their pores
and breathing large
gallons of fresh air in-
stead of loafing at
home and smoking.
No business men com-
plain so loudly of the
bicycle's inroads a s
the jewelers. The
young man whose am-
bition was to possess
a handsome watch and
who donned it as a
symbolic toga virilis,
now gets a bicycle.
The theatre managers
say that ruin is in the
air if people do not
soon stop riding; and
one can well believe
them after watching
the swarms of lamps
like will o' the wisps moving rapidly and noiselessly
up the Boulevard between 7 P.M. and midnight.
The manufacturers of clothing are just as badly
off. Every day hundreds of men burn their ships
behind them and appear at the office in bicycle suits,
with the construction of which their quondam tailors

"Oh, did you see a gentleman on a bicycle as you came up?"

"No; but I saw a man sitting at the bottom of a hill mending an old umbrella."-From

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Punch.

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had nothing to do, which do not need to be pressed and creased; which are very cheap comparatively, and which last longer, except in certain parts which shall be nameless and which can easily be made double. The shoemaker is aghast at the slump in heeling and half soling, and the hat maker does not approve of those cheap hats which have no assailable dignity to begin with, and which, therefore, practically last forever. And the plight of the horse

LOVE'S ENDURANCE.

MISS DOLLY (to her fiancé): "Oh, Jack! This is delightful! If you'll only keep up the pace I'm sure I shall soon gain confidence." (Poor Jack has already run a mile or more and is very short of condition.)-From Punch.

dealer, the stable keeper and riding master is obvious.

Both bicycling and the other new game-new so far as America is concerned-of golf, are having a marked effect on the popular method of passing the Sabbath. People who do not allow wheeling in their families on Sunday are now regarded as strict Sabbatarians, and while the same cannot be said perhaps of golf, still numbers devote themselves to it of a Sunday afternoon who would not think of playing tennis or baseball on that day. The practice of wheeling on the Sabbath clearly results in a net gain of righteousness, even if one does not consider the effect during the remainder of the week on the disposition of the cyclist. Perhaps it might be shown that the attendance at church was less, and yet we see in the papers every day accounts of the entertainment of cyclists by progressive ministers, of sermons preached inviting them to church, and of processions of wheelmen going there. But admitting that some falling off from church attendance is to be looked for,-when one considers the amount of loafing and drinking on the Sabbath which wheeling is taking the place of, there is not much temptation to pessimism on this score.

Within its necessarily restricted limits the game of golf has made strides in the favor of Americans which would seem marvelous were it not for the much more rapid advance of wheeling. Where only three years ago a solitary golf course in America was a curiosity and a mystery, there are thousands of men and women of all ages who have become fair average players; there are courses about Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Aiken, S. C., Thomasville, Ga., and a dozen other points, with, however,

Boston and Philadelphia in the lead as golfing centres. It is to be hoped, by the way, that some one will disabuse the public mind of the belief in the word "links" as applying to any golf course. The links of England are sea meadows, and the grounds outside of Denver could not be more solecistically described than by the phrase "golf links."

The game was without a doubt helped into general favor by its usual association with aristocratic surroundings. It is one of the oldest games, indeed, and has been for centuries the sport of princes. But, as a matter of fact, in its older habitats it is not by any means restricted to princes or noblemen or millionaires either. The famous St. Andrew's Links themselves are a public course, and the English populace in general are not below indulgence in the game. There is a public course at Cortlandt Park, New York, but in the present state of skill in America a visitor there enjoys a very mild quality of golf. Given the course, there is scarcely a game which requires less expenditure of money than golf, and there is no reason why its popularization should not extend much further, especially as it forms, even more than bicycling, a means of pleasant outdoor exercise open to the middle aged and elderly as well as to vigorous young men. The sport has been promptly admitted to the columns of the press; our weeklies are even furnishing regular reports from the golf contests of England; the most staid newspapers discuss through grave columns the arguments, pro and con, for a

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A

EXPERIENTIA DOCET. PROFICIENT BICYCLIST: "Well, old chap, how are you getting on?"

COMMENCING BICYCLIST: "Thank you, not badly; but I find I can get off better."From Punch.

"slow back;" and an authoritative work on golfing claims as much space for review as Mr. Lecky's book on democracy.

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Another game of even more ancient traditions and aristocratic pretensions than golf is coming every day more into favor with those Americans who are fortunate enough to be able to indulge in it. Polo ponies, however, are a luxury which a very small proportion of the public can enjoy; yet we hear that there are now no less than thirty clubs in the new polo association, and every now and then this noble and exhilarating game breaks out in some fresh region. Indeed, it is of world-wide popularity now; whether in India or Persia or London or the Long Island meadows, the men who have once mastered it are equally enthusiastic. The dash and fierce excitement of the polo skirmish, the inimitable horsemanship required of the leaders in the art, the pluck and quickness called forth, will always keep polo alive and on the increase while there are

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