Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/302



272 A WEEK AT CORRIENTES.

box, unplastered as the streets are unpaved, parapetted and embrasured at the top. The best are mostly supplied with a tile cornice breaking the stuccoed " dickeys/^ and with fayades rising high and proud towards the firmament. They afi'ect the Argentine silver and azure. The walls are either of brick or of the small unbaked adobe, and the latter are often set in a framework of timber, as you see in the Brazil and in old English farmhouses. The numbers are, as usual, odd on one side of the street, even on the other : all are apparently parts of an immense whole, 620, for instance, or 490 — the lower ciphers being omitted by request. The blocks are supposed to measure 150 varas (yards) each way ; but they are very irregular. None are complete, and even in the heart of the settlement thatched hovels and gardens cover the greater part of the surface.

The older houses of " Taraqui " are quaint and pic- turesque ; recessed ground-floors, fronted by verandahs on posts with carved capitals. The outside windows look heavily barred as any gaol ; and from the street you see the occu- pants of the sitting-room, whose sofa and two perpendicu- larly-disposed parallels of chairs are correct Iberian style. The inner portion is prettily disposed in dwarf gardens and grass plots, with seats among the red and white roses, shaded by orange trees and tall cypresses ; often there is a vinery, and in one I saw a hydrant. The best buildings are flat-faced, altos or sobrados, double- storied, with miradores ; very few have verandahs projecting over the trottoir, and affording shelter from sun and rain. Mostly they are '^ half-sobrados,^^ that is to say, raised on masonry founda- tions above the damp ground. The architecture, as well as the vegetation, here inclines more to the tropical, to the Brazilian. The ranchos have sloping tile roofs to pour off" the rain, and the poorer tenements prefer the hollow trunks of the ^^ palma de tejo ^^ (tile-palm) split, cut into pieces six