Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/128



98 MONTE VIDEO.

Plans^ however, are everywhere published^ and these may he printed even on the backs of Almanacks and Ayers Sar- saparilla.

There are two views of the little capital where she best shows her peculiarities. The first is that seen as you skirt the southern end of the eastern or new town. The thorough- fares facing west-south-west, and abutting upon the water, open as you run by them : after the gorgeous growth of Rio de Janeiro, they look bald and stony, treeless and barren as lanes in a burrow. The sky-line is fi^etted with miradores, gazebos, steeples, and here and there towers a gaunt factory chimney. Successively rise high into the air a huge-flanked religious house ; a Dutch-tiled cupola, over whose ochred walls peep cypresses and black rows of empty niches declaring it to be a cemetery ; the English ^' temple '* resembling a shed to stable bathing machines, or a reformed powder magazine sulkily turning back upon the bay -, the new hospital (de Caridad), three storied, yellow tinted, and dwarfing as it should the churches ; the big brick barn â€” also seen in reverse â€” known as the Solis Theatre, and the Hotel Oriental, which, like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies. Then comes the substantial stone Matriz of SS. Philip and James, the " womV^ whence have issued other places of worship. The whole aff'air is a mistake ; the dome springing from the flat roof suggests a pepper castor upon a thick book : it is too small and too distant from the towers, and these are absurdly far apart : fantastic as to terminals, the minaret-shaped belfries are evidently crooked, diverging like asses' ears. All three protuberances are capped with azulejos, blue and white Dutch tiles, fancifully disposed, which glisten like the gilt cupolas of Moscow, and whose eye-pleasing power suggests that you might imi- tate it to advantage at home. This is everywhere the practice of Argentine land, and whenever the dome is