Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/310



280 A WEEK AT CORRIENTES.

invested by low tenements. Here huge- wheeled carts^ drawn by restive cattle^ offer for sale grass and firewood. Begun by President D. Juan Puyol in 1854-56, and abandoned in 1858, this promoted fane had cost in 1863 some $130,000. With heavy Doric portico, single double-storied tower, and dome bristling with scafibld, it would readily fall but for the strength of the bricks, which are set with lime outside, and inside with mud. And it runs other dangers : a cannon ball has cracked the belfry. Evidence of a foreign hand appears in the clerestory and in an embryo transept rounded off at both ends ; all, however, is unfinished, except the tem- porary wooden chapel, where collections are made.

We must visit the cemetery, which, as usual, commands a charming view. As at Venice the defunct are the best lodged, so in South America the Cities of the Dead usurp the finest sites. We make it by a road through a dried-up marsh that becomes a slimy "pantano" after a day's rain, despite the ardent sun ; and presently we reach the Plaza de la Cruz del Milagro. The auspicious site is like the square of a Brazilian village, a common of gramilla or pasto tierno, with here and there a wretched rancho, or a half-roofed hut, growing up around it. Evidently the burial-ground is much too near the homes of the living; meanwhile we greatly enjoy the distant prospect of the city and the graceful inland slope of the grassy and well- wooded river- bank. Before the turreted chapel stands a wooden dial, inscribed "F. Johannes Nepumecinus Alegre, 1857." The graveyard is badly kept as the Recoleta of Buenos Aires, and Joao de Barros the thrush impudently sits upon the Emblem of Man's Salvation. The tombs are heavy, taste- less masses, which topple over as soon as possible ; some are oven-shaped ; a family vault resembles a Californian steam- bath sunk in the ground ; there is a quaint monument with its iron railing mighty like a bottomless camp bedstead.