Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/183



A DAY AT BUENOS AIllES. 153

and rheumatic horses sticks and dips, rises and struggles painfully along, urged by the screams of the European, who has now ousted the Gaucho. The last transfer is to the northernmost of the two moles, the shallow water utterly disqualifying for use the southern one fronting the large Custom-house. Men and women, loungers and promenaders, gather in groups at the mole-head, adding ridicule to your difficulties as if you were in the tidal boat entering Boulogne. Lads and boys playfully wreathe their bodies in, out, and through the timbers of the main jetty, or bathe and fish in the troubled waters below, or foully bewray the dirty steps. Some thirty or forty excited changadores (porters) and peons (labourers) make a dash at your baggage, and the unsuccessful salute the successful with a volley of foul abuse. These men are the common carriers of the country : it is actionable (with the knife) to call a decent man ^' peon^^ (our pawn from the Persian '^ piyadaV^), and the Frenchman will, when wishing to say his worst, emphatically declare of the hated rival, " C'est un pe-on \"

After enduring this savage mobbery, you step probably upon an iron bar, and climb up broken steps to landing- places which are also of the filthiest. The new '^ Muelle,^"' built in 1855 for the local Government by the late Mr. Taylor, C.E., is a wretched affair, some 440 yards long, by 20 wide and 7 to 8 high, composed of soft pine timbers dis- posed crosswise. There is ever, despite the daily abuse of the daily papers, a hole in the mole, or rather a series of holes, while a system of mighty cracks, crannies, and crevices makes the whole affair a man-trap â€” but, until lately, anything was " good enough for the Plate.^' The rain-welled surface is slippery as the clay of Fernando Po or the Puy de Dome, and I have seen a man badly hurt by it, his legs coming from under him as if on ice.