Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/301



A WEEK AT CORRIENTES. 271

cally boatmen. After the usual examination, whose results pronounced me to be an " agrimensor/^ we entered the Calle Rioja, going south ; it corresponds with the Riva- davia or Regent Street of Buenos Aires. There is a pain- ful regularity in the names. The fourteen that open upon the northern face are called after the Argentine provinces ; but that on the north-eastern corner is " Paraguay " by anticipation. Those running east-west have been baptized after local heroes — e.g., Vera and Bolivar, Belgrano and San Martin ; after battles, as Junin and Ayacucha ; or after patriotic subjects, for instance, Sud-America, Confederacion, and Independencia. The names are carefully painted upon boards, but no one knows them ; you must ask, after the old fashion, for the street of Don A. B.^ which is ridiculous.

The usual little bit of thoroughfare is paved ; the rest have a surface of country soil overlying loose sand. They are about fifty feet wide, and here and there wooden scant- ling shores up scraps of brick trottoir, so narrow that you must walk in Indian file. At intervals cross-bands of stone or tree-trunks act as bridges, and prevent the street being washed bodily away. After heavy rains some thorough- fares are cascades and others are pools : both gradually pass from a stifi" \dscid mud to a state of ^' hardbake,^' and lastly to a mobile black dust, which dirties the hands like the atmosphere of a railway. Carts cannot progress with- out the tallest of wheels, and three horses in a kind of unicorn. There is no gas above Rozario, nor are the streets bombees. As in the older French towns, they de- cline towards a central gutter, and only the happy water- slope of the town prevents the horrors of Lima and Mexico. Beyond the centre of population, these thoroughfares fine off into alleys of scattered ranchos, rough as newly-ploughed fields.

The house is of the normal headless Arab type ; a long