Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/138



1C8 MONTE VIDEO.

sunk into low taverns. They are mostly cottages, humble as the beginnings of Imperial Rome^ with one door and one window^ the "porta e janella"' of the Brazil, or with two doors and without a window. The sloping roof of tiles is well grown with tropical vegetation. The smallest represent a door, a room on both sides of it, and a little patio or court behind. The better sort are low and long tenements, with tall solid entrances, which remind you of private chapels. Now a superior style has been introduced by the Italian masons, and we shall presently see it better developed at Buenos Aires. The tenements have mostly a headless impoverished look, as if awaiting another story, which in fact they do. The azoteas (corrupted from the Ai'abic El Sat'h) are flat terraces, which not only collect rain, they also form good lounging places, and they supply, as we know to our cost, means of defence, every house becoming a castle. You stare at the number of banks and barbers; the former are accounted for by the curso for90so, the forced paper currency ; the latter, by every man requiring his own Truefitt, hired by the year. The population in 1865 was 50,000, it is now 75,000, which we may reduce to 60,000. And it will presently rise to 100,000.

The first glance at Monte A^ideo sets it down as a town rather than a city, what would be called over the water a " one-horse " place, a single-barrelled affair. You can hardly believe that it has or ever had as much behind it as Buenos Aires. The streets appear narrow, the squares are small and mean, whilst the public buildings are utterly undeserving of description. Moreover, they are all carefully photo^d by the enterprising Messrs. MulhalFs (M. G. and E. T.) " New Handl)ook of the River Plate," called in County Dublin jocose way ^^ Handbook," because the two volumes ai^e about as handy as a Post-office Directory. The work, in which the veteran sojourner of exact turn of mind detects a variety