Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/309



A WEEK AT CORRIENTES. 279

trate or Lord Mayor), the Judges, civil, criminal, and com- mercial ; together with the Bank and the Custom-house.

We have not yet "done" the churches, which in this country-capital are many, whilst none are wholly mass-less and the canoe-hat abounds in the streets. Fronting the Cabildo are the church and cloistered convent of La Merced, a domeless brick building with Doric portico, and towers as much too low as the cathedral belfry is too tall. The regular orders are the Mercedarios and the Franciscan friars ; the latter have two houses in a " city^' which has not yet dreamed of a book-store. Both are sent to bepreach the Indians, and the payers complain that they prefer the comforts of town to the Christianization of the Gran Chaco. By the side of La Merced is a gloomy prison-like old house, dated 1698, with the tall ornamental gateway — here rare^ but common at Santiago and Lima — the property of a priest some ninety-eight years old : it lately lodged Dr. Santiago Derqui, first civilian President of the Argentine Republic and failure. Two squares to the north-east is San Francisco Solano, whose two steeples, bran-new but still unfinished, are not set square to the front, and are ridiculously thin compared with the old barrel-roof farcically broad. The Azulejos, or blue-glazed tiles, are being slowly applied : they come from Portugal, and they cost money. The simple inside consists of nave and aisles, formed by five substantial whitewashed piers : the high altar is painfully flat, and there is a sacristy but no transept. The earlier shell, some twenty feet high, is evidently old ; the superstructure dates from the days when the Brazilian Pedrinho — cant name for the local Napoleon — represented a crown, and when the pretty Correntinas made money by means that no one would guess. Finally, the new cathedral of San Juan Bautista, ex-chapel of the Rozario, fronts an open space, known as El Piso, grand in size, but bare except of mud or dust, and being gradually