Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/276



246 ACTUALITIES OF ROZARIO (SANTA FE).

the typical John Bull^ and in character an excellent com- bination of what is most valuable in the two races^ English and Anglo-American. I only hope that he may live to see his various projects crowned with success.

Mr. Wheelwright obligingly gave me letters to his officials, Mr. Ben. Lea, agent for the contractors, and Mr. George Cooper, Mechanical Engineer. It is mortifying to find how ungenial and even ofi*ensive, after the perfect courtesy of Argentine and Brazilian, are not a few of one^s countrymen. Perhaps it is often merely the roughness of ignorance that never saw society beyond shop or engine-house, but common sense should teach a man how to receive a visit without, for instance, turning the visitor from his door. The only exception to the rule of Central Argentine Railway incivility was Mr. Woods, Chief "Resident Engineer. He led us about the spacious station which is now being built ; we found all in active progress — passenger-rooms, engine-houses, offices, repairing shops, wood sheds, houses for mechanics, and machinery of every description required. This is doing things on a large scale : half the terminal " Cares'*^ in the Brazil would fit into a station 1000 metres long by 120 broad. The site is an old cemetery, from which skulls and other valuables were taken; these have unfortunately all been dispersed. For making the bricks of the enclosure, which requires millions, pugging-machines were brought out — the English shape, not the flat Argentine, is pre- ferred, and straw and manure are rendered inadmissible by the cut ting- wires. Under the upper black humus, one foot thick and preferred by the natives, our engineers found a subsoil of yellow clay, while sand of superior quality than that supplied by the river was discovered up the line, and is delivered for $4 per cubic yard. At first the proportions were three parts of black and yellow earth to one of arenaceous matter ; this was afterwards changed to five