Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/205



A GLANCE AT BUENOS AIRES. 175

ridors paved with white marble, and ending in a garden, or at least in a shrubbery. On sunny days a velum stretched across secures coolness. The system is pleasant for the individual, bad for the community, as the waste of space is prodigious. All the older tenements are ground floors ; the " Alto," or many-storied house, the " Sobrado," or " Caza nobre" of the Brazil, does not belong to these latitudes, but it is becoming common ; and the difficulty of finding building ground is also gradually interfering with the ventilation. The taste for tall houses has exaggerated the mirador, or look-out ; it is often provided with extensive balconies, and with well railed exterior staircases ; when three stories tall it makes, as in the Limagne, the house appear like a box standing on one end. On both sides of the entrance-hall are the saloons and dining rooms, whose windows looking upon the street are barred like the jails ; the inmates therefore can be seen, as in a French bathing place, by every passer by â€” and naughty boys delight to pull up the persiannes, or green blinds. This is contrary to the custom of Lima, where the sitting rooms in the best tene- ments are always at the bottom of the court.

The main square, Plaza de la Victoria, the heart of cir- culation, the business part where men in fine weather seem to live, and where you meet all your acquaintances half a dozen times a day, is small and mean, fitted for a country town, utterly unworthy of a metropolis, the Pro- vincial and Confederative capital, the seat of the local and general legislature, a New York and Washington in one. It suggests the days of that old foundation-stone laid down by D. Pedro de Mendoza at the corner of the present Calles Eivadavia and San Martin, which when nearly crushed by carts was put, by the piety of a local antiquary, into splints, a flat cross of iron bands. The Plaza is one quarter of what such a city requires, and