about the beginning of the sixteenth century.
At the present time, after allowing for all that
are withdrawn in course of trade by sale to the
curing-houses or saladeros, and otherwise, it is
calculated that the number doubles every four
years! The proprietor of an estancia, or cattle
estate, makes bullocks of all the males, excepting
one to every twenty covs, that proportion
being found most favourable to increase without
damage of stock by the contests that arise
among the cattle themselves when bulls are too
numerous. The air is wholesome, grass and
water abound, there are no murrains or
epidemics of any kind to distress the cattle. Their
herds live under the purest natural conditions,
and although they don't grow fat, as our own
inactive stall-fed oxen do, their flesh is the more
fit to be meat for vigorous and healthy men.

When any of these cattle are bought for the
market or the saladero, agreement is made by
the purchaser as to number, age, and condition.
The oxen are usually chosen from two years and
a half old and upwards, cows from three years
and upwards, quality from "good beef," which
means lean kine, to fat. The contract having
been signed, the business of making troop is set
about by mounted horsemen. The cattle being
driven into a mass, a few tame decoy cattle are
placed at a distance, and, as they are let out, a
few at a time, to run towards these, the buyer
selects his beasts, and the selected cattle are
chased to the gathering-place, the others driven
off into their boundless pastures. For about
six hundred yards a young bullock of the
Pampas will outrun a good horse, but after that
the horse's power of endurance masters him.
When the required number has been got
together, the separated herd is looked over for
strays of a sort not bargained for or not to be
sold, and for calves that have followed the cows.
The troop rightly made up— it is a day's work
to get about three hundred together, and the
purchases for the saladeros are usually of from
five hundred to a thousand at a time the
purchased herd is driven off, and will become that
good beef of which the Scotch have already
made some progress towards discovering the
use. Sold at threepence a pound, this beef,
although cured or dried in the old ways, is
beginning now to be appreciated in England;
for it makes good soup and savoury stews, will
keep as ham or bacon is kept to be cut at, bit
by bit, fulfilling the requisite condition of a
meat-store in the labourer's cottage. Thus it
takes away that difficulty in the use of fresh
butchers' meat which has hitherto driven our
labourers to use bacon, although bacon is less
nutritious than meat, and, pound for pound,
more costly.

As for those methods of curing meat by which
two hundred tons of good animal food are
destroyed annually in Glasgow alone, and in
America— where four millions of pigs were cured
last year in only eight states— the waste is yet
more enormous, a way has been lately suggested
of making even here the best of a bad job. The
brine, too salt for human food, really contains,
as we have seen, a strong soup of the most
precious juices withdrawn from the meat. It has
been proposed to get the salt out of that soup by
a simple application of chemistry. The brine is
put into closed skins, and the skins are soaked
in water. By a common and important process
in the chemistry of nature— of which cherry
brandy is the most familiar illustration— the
salt will pass out through the skin and water
will pass in, as cherry juice passes out through
the cherry skin and brandy passes in. The re-
sulting liquor in the skin is said to be a dilute
soup that can be concentrated, flavoured, and
prepared into nutritious food.

OUT AT ELBOWS.

SOME people are always out at elbows. Give
them to-day a new coat made of the thickest
broadcloth, and sewed with the stoutest thread,
and to-morrow there will be a hole, with the
protruding ulna thrusting itself into public notice
as usual. No amount of broadcloth will keep
their elbows decent; and you may stitch up all
the chasms of the Alps sooner than you can
keep their seams together: the man or the
woman born out at elbows will die out at elbows,
and though their friends spend their lives in
darning over the rents, the darns will be only
Penelope's webs at the best, and the night will
undo what the day has wrought. As well might
you try to fill Chat Moss with garden-mould
shovelled in by spadefuls, as to knit up certain
lives into good order and a tolerable sufficiency:
you may give money, help, advice, example, till
you are weary— you may go to unheard-of trouble
to get this presentation and that office— you
may do a little bit of jobbery and a great deal
of nepotism, some bribery and more cajolery, to
have them settled and comfortably claa and
provided for. It is all to no good. Seams will still
unrip and elbows will still protrude. These
persons are destined by an inexorable fate and
an unlucky constitution to be always in tatters.

By no means absolute to poverty is out-at-
elbowism; for poverty has often a scrupulous
regard to rents and seams. Go into a house where
elbows are out— no matter what the means, no
matter how they may be sought to be hidden—
there they are, obtrusive, denuded, dominant.
Whatever the wealth in such a house, there will
be the elbows— thrust into your face at every
turn. Dine at this house: the dinner of rich
meats will be served on a soiled, perhaps a
tattered, table-cover; the massive silver forks will
be tarnished; the service will be fragmentary;
the organisation incomplete; some want will be
sure to be seen in every corner, and elbows,
naked, red, and pointed, where should have
been a fluting of velvet or an eider-down
cushion. Magnificent furniture which the house-
maid does not consider it is in her wages
to dust; large, rooms with grand ceilings,
and the stilled atmosphere of a house never
thoroughly cleansed and never thoroughly
opened; gorgeous apparel costing many sums,