Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/184



154 A DAY AT BUENOS AIRES.

Lastly, your luggage is deposited at the northernmost half of the " Resguardia/^ here represented by two little summer-houses, kiosks, or China tea-rooms, wooden curio- sities striped blue and white, queerly attached to the root of the long projection. The kiosk mania has migrated from the banks of the Seine to far Father Plate; at Buenos Aires you see them even in the main square. They sell newspapers and cheap books. Erotic lyrics, and half- naughty photos. ; none ever knew a body who had ever entered into one of them. The Custom-house officers are very civil, and slow in proportion ; " nada mas que ropa" will generally do the douanier. They open, however, carefully every box and bag, although they probably consider rum- maging not the work of a " cavalier." For this " pitch and toss treatment^^ you pay your part of boat $50, landing- cart $20, and say four changadores, $90 = $ 140 (paper) = 1/. 3^., and you at once discover that the sovereign here is the crown in Europe.

The site of Buenos Aires is commercially bad ; the ^' old men" could hardly have looked forward to the present state of trade. Even for them, either San Fernando to the north or Ensenada to the south-east would have been better. Strangers explain the peculiar choice by the fre- quency and daring of those days buccaneers, when shallows, as we shall see up-stream, formed defences. Pro- bably the roads were a long while ago deeper, and have silted up during the course of ages. Yet DobrizhoflPer in 1784 found the port of Buenos Aires shoal water. The internal action of the earth has, however, certainly caused a gradual upheaval of this, the shelf- edge of the Pampas, as well as of the great Prairies themselves. On the Parana Kiver we shall everywhere see successive marks of former water-levels many yards higher than the highest modern floods. Others have made dust, the incremental material