Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/204



174 A GLANCE AT BUENOS AIRES.

de Maio/^ also recessed, of the melancholy Doric type to which Protestant Christianity is reduced in these "idola- trous lands"– * There is a chaplain, but the sheep are mostly in a state of blood-feud with their shepherd. If he be ungenial, they pay him and hate him; if he be fond of mild pleasures, say of a social glass, a cigar, and a game of whist, they vote him unclerical and propose to pay some other person.

We study the Buenos Airean house as we advance. Here all trades are monopolized by some nation, and the Italians have made themselves the master masons and the masons, even as the Irish are the hod-carriers of the United States. Their building is an improved and Romanized Spanish, tinted for the most part outside. Every stranger coming from Rio de Janeiro remarks the beauty and solidity of the houses, and much more does he admire who comes from that drab-coloured wooden abomination, Valparaiso, where fire or ruin by earthquake is purely a question of time. In the old establishment all is coarse and heavy; the brick-paved patio, with its rude horseshoe arches, the flat roof draining into the Aljibe, rain-tank, or cistern â€” I have advised you to beware of the fluid â€” and the badly laid out plan in which the bedrooms, for instance, conduct to the saloons, speak of a time when wealth was general and re- finement rare. This under the artistic Ausonian touch has become a fairy garden of creepers and orchids, flowers and air plants, in half-Moorish style, decorating light colonnades, fretwork in stone, or arabesques in ironwork, lit up with gilding, and painted with tender green or white and blue â€” Argentine colours which here blend well. The frontage is mostly narrow and reduced to a door and two windows ; on the other hand, the depth is half a square, or 225 feet. Large establishments therefore have generally two or more patios, forming a pleasant vanishing vista of shady cor-