Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/348



318 HUMAITA.

of brick, witL. tiled roof, three doors, four windows, and a tall whitewashed entrance in token of dignity, leading to a pretty quinta, above whose brick walls peep oranges and a stunted "curii" (Araucaria Brasiliensis). The "three enormous tigers," which each ate a calf for breakfast, are gone ; the front is bespattered and pierced with shot, and I see no signs of the bomb-proof " taniere" in which, they say, the Marshal- President used to lurk. The quarters occupied by Madame Lynch are far to the rear, in the "women's encampment" The main sala, whence he drove away with kicks and cuffs the officers who announced to him the destruction of his hopes by the fall of Uru- guayana, was shown to us : here the Argentines found un- packed boxes containing furniture from Paris. This was their only civilized "loot;" the rest was represented by rusty guns, by lean mules, by 100 cases of bottles containing palm oil, and by some fifty tercios or sacks of mate, each holding eight arrobas, and here worth $4.

Westward of the "palace" lie the quarters of the staff, the arsenal, the Almoxarifado (Custom-house, &c.), and the soap manufacture. These are the " magnificent barracks" for 12,000 men of which we read in the newspapers, long, low, ground- floor ranchos, with mud walls, and roofed with a mixture of thatch, tile, and corrugated iron. Never even loopholed, they had been much knocked about and torn by shot. The arsenal has now been turned into commissariat and ammunition stores. It is fronted by a guerite or raised sentry-box, and by a huge flagstaff bearing the Brazilian flag.

The batteries are eight in number, and again we will begin with them up-stream. After a scatter of detached guns, some in the open, others slightly parapeted, we find the Bateria Cadenas, or chain-battery of thirteen guns, backed by the Artillery Barracks. The chain, which con-