Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/177



TO THE COLON lA AND BUENOS AIRES. 147

here perhaps the best. Its rails are looted Paraguayan, found in the Custom-house, and duly confiscated.

Inland of the Boca is Las Barracas, the " stores " (for goods-housing), northern and southern ; a settlement about double the size of its neighbour; and a congeries of sheds and courts, commanded by rf two-steepled church. Thi.Â» dead flat, a prolongation of the estuary bay is the spou where " Que buenos Ayres se respiran en esta tierra V exclaimed stout Captain Sancho Garcia, and where D. Pedro de Mendoza, the Grandee,laid the foundation-stone of nuestra Senora de Buenos Aires. The date, (February 2, 1535), was only three years after the establishment of San Vicente^ the Portuguese proto-colony in the Brazil, and two years and a half before the building of Paraguayan Asuncion (August 15, 1537). The once charming stream is now foul with mud and offal, and there is a dreadful perfume of tallow and liquid meat, mixed with the essence of calcined bones. The population is evidently Basque, and iron wirings are required, as in Egypt, to keep out the flies, which haunt the streets by myriads. There is trade in Las Barracas, we see an inn with a Russian inscription, and the beggars do not, as in the city, confine themselves to Saturdays. Here the Saladero may be studied to advantage by the amateur butcher, and described by those who would add another description to the scores published. I will only say that the salting-houses at Buenos Aires will presently run short of work if they continue slaughtering 390,000 head of cattle, as happened between October 1, 1868, and April 1. 1869.

And here, for your benefit, I shall shortly dispose of the normal stock subjects in Argentine-land : " Let all such history/^ says the old Styrian, "be consigned to the spice shop to wrap paper, yea, to a meaner office.^^ Such is the Gaucho, who has been hopelessly vulgarized by the last

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