Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/312



282 A WEEK AT CORRIENTES.

Beyond the Alameda is the Brazilian military hospital of San Francisco,, which caused so much excitement throughout the empire when the evil-minded report was spread that the Correntinos were plotting to burn it. Its commanding position upon the tall bank was admirably chosen. It is, however, now being dismantled. Much of the timber has been plundered, but the energetic Peterkin stops such pro- ceedings with a strong hand. A Brazilian officer involved in this ugly affair was duly punished.

The climate of Corrientes is subject to brutal variations of temperature. Sometimes for days together the mercury will stand at 106Â° to 108Â° (F.) in the shade ; then it will suddenly fall to 82Â°. The people declare that their city is not unhealthy, yet they suffer from languor, chuchu"^ (ague, the Brazial sezao), heart disease, and "pasmo real ^' or tetanus — here common as in Paraguay. I often see the hearse de- corated with besoms of ostrich feathers. The nights are cool and always dewy : in early mornings the land smokes with damp, whilst the sky of noon-day is perfectly pure. Mid- winter (July to August) has a few hardly-perceptible frosts, always when the sun is down ; so in Sao Paulo the people count in the year two freezing nights. On August 13, the date of the great Peruvian and Ecuadorian earthquake, there was a hurricane violent as those of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. September 8 honoured us with a bad storm of thunder and rain from the east, that swamped the land, and made the street-mud slippery as oil : the next day was hot and sultry weather, the morma90 of the Brazil. On September 10 the sky cleared, and the people expected some twenty days of charming spring. In November there are often torrents of rain ; and the citizens, having no fire-

as. Much less chucha. Some write the word chu-chu, and translate it cold-heat," i.e., ague and fever.
 * Not chucho, which is a kind of poisonous grass, found upon the Pam-