Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/200



170 A DAY AT BUENOS AIRES.

wines are poor^ and the proprietor, coining gold, does not care a fig for public opinion. The waiter, who in Chile and Peru waits at full gallop, here creeps the snaiFs pace. To secure attention you must give the garqon five times the old sou per franc, the fee of Paris ; with less than 25 per cent, he will be negligent, and, unless you check him, he will wax insolent.

In the evening we went to the Italian Opera in the Colon Theatre, a huge pile whose red-painted roof gives a fine view of the city and suburbs, whose double row of balconies is much admired, and whose fretted ironwork shelters a masonic hall, where the brother is safe from the '^ Cowan.'^ Its exterior is much praised with little reason ; its shape is claret chest, its order is of the railway station style of art, and the most we can say of it is that its ugliness is not so ugly as that of many such buildings. Do you not wonder why the moderns always make their theatres like the palaces of Baghdad, " mean and hideous without ?^^ The inside is dingy and badly lighted, and sundry vigilantes are on guard to keep the passages clear. For real and imminent risk in case of fire or panic the audience can hardly be worse lodged in any public building yet made. Will no one take a hint from the vomitories of the ancients ?

The first aspect of Portena beauty, of whose face and figure I had heard so much, did not dazzle these eyes. The most admired belles pointed out to me were the clear, dark little crumpled faces, the nez a la Ro.valane ; the low narrow brow, beloved of Horace ; the well-opened velvety black eyes â€” which they know perfectly how to use â€” and the piquant expression, which the real Spaniard prefers to the signs of the bluest blood. These small physiognomies were powdered over like apple-pies, lit up with rouge at the cheeks like pommes d'apis, and buried in vast masses, with terminal manes of " frightful hair '^ like the mane and tail