Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/269



ACTUALITIES OF ROZAllIO (SANTA FE). 239

destal is indigo blue, the cornice is dirty gamboge ycllow_, the basement is chocolate-coloured, and the four steps that lead up to it are mottled with chipping. Around it stands a small family of four young columns a quarter grown and headless : the busts which surmounted them have been injured and removed. A seedy iron railing and tipsy- looking lamps complete the monument, which reads a lesson in high art to the Rosarinos.

Facing the north of the main square is the new Gefatura, a tall and handsome building : it lacks, however^ the useful clock of the Buenos Aires Cabildo. The Matriz, whose two round white steeples of the pepper-castor order can be seen from the river, and make ns compliment Rozario upon not having too much church, is on the eastern side. Fronting west, and adjoining it to the north, is a low yellow building that acts as priests' quarters and police office. Nothing can be more hideous than this attempt at classical art, its plaster Ionic pillars, with intervals unknown to the gods or Vitru- vius. At 9.10 A.M. mass on Sundays and fetes the church is crammed. Men in the blackest of black suits stand bareheaded under that dreadful portico. The women — endimanchees — overwhelming society with superfluous dry goods, and dressed not to please the other sex so much as to displease their own, squat upon the floor. The first glance justified me in quoting

" Ugly church, ugly steeple, Ugly square, and ugly people."

The latter are mostly Chinos — don't mistake this for Chinese — uninteresting half-breeds, white-red, with here and there a flavour of Ham. China girls, tall and cleanly made, with fine long black hair, eyes like the llama's, luscious lips, and skins of bronze that show only one single tone, are ad- mirable in their early teens. Marriageable at thirteen, after the third lustre they devote themselves somewhat fanatically