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 properly cleaned with a grass broom dipped in cold water and just swished about over it, and, by going down on my knees with a scrubbing brush and hot water and soap, and giving a practical demonstration of how a floor should be washed, had started her away to clean it, and judged that I might safely leave her, to attend to the other household duties in the kitchen.  I must tell you that the day previously I had given her a practical lesson in black-leading a stove by doing it myself while she looked on.  Well, after an hour in the kitchen I returned to see how she was getting on, when I found