Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/135



MONTE VIDEO. 105

bonnet of blue or scarlet wool ; by his fleshy nose, his thin compressed lips_, his well-made bust, and his thin wiry legs, to say nothing of his harsh antediluvian tongue. He is, however, a favourite in the country ; he adopts the native costume and he spends his coin freely, which his rival does not. Foreigners mostly complain that he is ignorant of cattle breeding, and, moreover, that compared with an Argentine, he is exceedingly duuderhended.

A goods tramway leads us through an open shed to the Custom-house, a big three- storied building, tinted slightly drab-yellow, with the inner windows of the upper-floor offices broken, like an Irish railway station after a Fenian row. The officers are mostly civil, they do not take douceurs, at least upon small matters â€” so far a great improvement upon the Brazil ; but they always insist upon opening your boxes, possibly from curiosity, and they sometimes rob. A companion and I here imprudently deposited a keg of Mendoza brandy which we had brought over the Andes and round by Magellan ; when Mr. Cecil A. Edye obligingly bottled it for us, he found that thirty-six had dwindled to sixteen.

After the Custom-house comes the Hotel, the lodging- house of Buenos Aires being here unknown. Hotels swarm as at Boulogne ; practically, however, there are^ or rather there were, three â€” the Blin, the Oriental, and the Gran Hotel Americano. The first is a kind of restaurant famed for feeding ; the closeness of its box-like rooms is frightful. The Oriental is kept by Ramon and Thomaz Fernandez, Spaniards and quondam cooks or valets to a certain Hebrseo- Teutonico- Iberian capitalist, here well known. Being the best, it is always crowded when money is not dear. I w^ould not lodge there, as during the cholera days it made the mistake of refusing to admit the wife of the British Minister, although a surgeon of the United States squadron