Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/206



176 A GLANCE AT BUENOS AIRES.

one half of what it easily could command. To eastward, behind the casemated ex-fort and Custom-house, and the Governmental *^ bungalow/' is a slovenly, foul, unpaved, dusty or muddy space, trodden only by high trotting horses and by country carts painted the colour of pig's blood. This is separated from the Victory Square by the Recoba Vieja, or " old Arcade," a thin line of cheap shops, with two long walls of jaundice-coloured brickwork, towering above the tenements in a fanciful profile, open over head ; intended to represent a triumphal arch, but surprisingly like a building that expects to be roofed in. If this hideous " relique of antiquity," which looks painfully new, really belong to a wealthy family that refuses to remove it, the nuisance should be abated by the local M. Haussmann and the Provincial Government, and thus the Plaza would ex- tend itself to the river side.

The Plaza is surrounded and crossed from north to south by avenues of the ubiquitous Paraiso (Paradise) tree, the English " Persian lilac," the American *^ Pride of India," the Latin Margosa (Amargosa), the Nim of Hindostan, the Calendar tree of the Levant, and the Melia Azedarachta (Persian Azad-darakht, or " free tree") of botanists. It is universally a favourite from Monte Video to the far interior, but the reason why we cannot explain. The shrub-like trees are always stunted; they are mere sticks in August, with little of leafage, hardly shading, even in March, the little kiosks that sell newspapers ; the boles are dark and dingy, and the bundles of brown berries are, out of chaplets, disagreeably prominent. The general aspect of the square is bald and poor, especially when seen after Santiago and Lima ; there are no diagonal pathways across the terreplein of yellow clayey earth, which every shower converts into a swamp of slippery slush. Here re- views are held ; I have heard of 6000 or 7000 bayonets on