their cabbage jewelry, are indistinguishable from their feminine sisters. An occasional pot of live cabbage in a patio or an apartment house window indicates a pair of Las Peraladas live there, and in the suburbs, where cabbages border a formal garden, is the home of the head of the group. Social in all their activities Las Peraladas attend en masse the concerts, theatres, lectures and once a week go horseback riding. Only in business or in their homes do they mix with nonmembers or men. None have ever been known to marry.

On the wall in Lima's Fine Art Museum hangs a painting of a powerful, square-jawed woman with a shield on her arm and a lance in her hand. Her name, La Peralada. Her history in a very old book printed in archaic Spanish is also in the museum. It explains that she kept a shop and lived with another woman who washed her clothing and prepared her food. This was in the village of Peralada, Spain, at the time of the French invasion. Some distance from the town she grew a garden. To pick cabbage one day she girded on her sword, and took a lance and shield with her. While in the patch she heard the tinkle of bells and quickly discovered they were in the pointral of a mounted French knight. He was having difficulty getting his horse out of the trench. She ended it by driving her lance thru his skirt, the saddle and into the horse. The frantic animal would have thrown him had he not been chained to the saddle, so with a sharp thrust of her sword she ended the animal's misery. The knight, realizing she was a more powerful man than he, surrendered to her. whereupon she removed the lance from his thigh and took him to Peralada. The following is a quotation from the book: Of this the Lord King and the Infanta were very joyous. The knight and his arms were her's and the

knight paid her a ransom of 200 florins. And thus you can see how proud the woman who washed her clothes and prepared her food was of her, and they were satisfied and happy together without men.

Each year at a banquet Las Peraladas crown a Cabbage Princess and give her a shield, a lance and a horse of silver.

To a tourist in Buenos Aires, Calle Florida differs from the other streets only because vehicular traffic thru it is prohibited after sunset; so it is doubtful if he notices a predominate number of men there and that many are meticulously dressed whereas the others have the look of laborers out for a good time and they are. Their slightly bowed legs, skins bronzed by the winds and sun, and the graceful action of their virile bodies arrests and holds your eyes-their names, your imagination, for they are the gauchos. The name of the club which they frequent is Las Floridas. It came into existence in the days before barbed wire imprisoned the vastness of the pampas and radically changed every gaucho's life. Whenever he went to Buenos Aires for entertainment he sought the companionship of other men because he feared getting diseases from whores and lower class Spanish Women. For some reason he found friends in Calle Florida and continued to find them there after the women became safer. The club is in the vicinity of the magnificent Colon Opera House and no woman has ever entered it.

Each year during the week of the fabulous cattle show, Buenos Aires' social season reaches its dizzy summit. In no city in the world is a stock show more lavish, more elegant. It is then the bejewelled Las Floridas in imported French gowns tango with their friends from the pampas.

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