Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/176



146 TO THE COLONIA AND BUENOS AIRES.

del Estero. Its two steeples of warm colour stand out from a goodly company of white houses and green trees. Distant three leagues south of the capital, it will, when the railroad reaches it, become a charming place for villeggiatura. The site is good, being the raised bank of the riverine valley, whose main drain is the Riachuelo or rivulet. Do not write with old travellers R. or Rio Chuelo, a funny form, re- appearing even in modern maps ; nor translate as does the gallant Sir Home Popham, " River Chuelo/"^

Looms ahead a forest of masts, with here and there a spread sail inland, overshadowing the scrubby vegetation of greyish metallic green. Then we sight the white houses of the Boca (de Riachuelo,) the mouth of the said rivulet. This is a dredge-demanding Styx, some 160 feet wide, a sluggish drain of black mud, that often runs red with the produce of a dozen Saladeros. The air is then heavy with meat, tainted as well as fresh; you turn pale, you feel at sea, you call for a ^^ uip,""' and all around you declare the atmosphere to be exceptionally health-breeding. Perhaps on the same principle Frenchmen used to take, and perhaps still take, their baths in an abattoir. The salting-houses are not salting now. December, when the animals are fat from grass, will open the season. The Boca is a hard-working suburb of Italians, occupying themselves, as we see, with stores and shipbuilding. Piles of North American pine line the quays. The native growths, especially the Quebracho (or Quebrahacho, the axe-breaker), and the Urunday Mimosa, whose short and crooked, but exceedingly hard gnarlings fit them for wheel-tires and boat-knees, are not so common but more valuable. Around the Boca is a swampy flat where the lumber-houses must perch high upon piers and stilts ; a few of yesterday^s build are of brick, but the walls sag and split. The Boca is connected with Buenos Aires by a branch railway in the good old style, chair and sleepers.