Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/245

 rebel army.

UP THE URUGUAY RIVER. 215

Hardly had Paysandu recovered from the horrors of war when it was attacked by cholera (1867), and such was the panic that sundry patients were buried alive. It is now, despite " pronanciamentos*' and internal feuds, a thriving little city, the seat of an Alcalde Ordinario, who can decide causes to the extent of $3000, and who will soon make way for a Juez letrado. It has its photographer, its college, and its two banks, the Maua and the Italian. The former has just built the best house in the place, and the ground, sold for $15 only twenty- two years ago, now fetches $7000 per half lot. The resident foreign mechanics make good furni- ture, even door-springs, which cannot be manufactured at Monte Video. The imports are dry and wet goods. The exports are the produce of cattle bred in the neighbourhood, and supplying each saladero with about 40,000 head per annum. Sheep are still rare, the pasture has not yet been fitted for them.

I spent a few pleasant days amongst the resident foreigners of Paysandu. Messrs. Tippet and Serra, engaged on the town-survey, supplied me with all details required by a traveller. M. Serra is a civilized Brazilian, brought up in Europe and speaking six languages fluently ; he has lost all that unpleasant look and that aggressive manner of the home bred, which seem to say " Nao hai como nosotros,^' and which rouse the bile of every stranger. To his brother, an employe in the Maua Bank, I am indebted for much information and for sundry photographs of Paysandu. Mr. Kennedy, the son of an Englishman here settled as librarian, and M. Legar, the French pharmacien, had witnessed the siege, and enabled me to compile an account of it. Mr. Thomas O^Connor and his two brothers showed me their salting-house, and as it works only between December and July, they put a bullock through the machinery to illustrate what 400 or 500 head undergo per diem. I was astonished