Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/383

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pools, which the clayey ground long retains ; here the puddles that disappear after the third day in the Brazil last a fortnight ; the result is a bad mud or an unpleasant marsh. The orange trees, planted by Presidential orders, had mostly been felled, and a pile of five fruits costs a shilling instead of a cent. The few survivors were webbed over with the nets of a sociable spider dressed in black and red coat ; it gives a strong yellow silk which will make gloves and dresses, and some of it has been exported from Corrientes to Paris : I found a far stronger and more brightly-tinted material on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea. The ground was everywhere sprinkled with Whit worths '^^ anti-w^ar bolts,^' 40, 120, and 150-pounders, and costing each from 20/. to 50/. Very few had exploded, and a pointed stick soon told the reason why : they had been charged, not with gunpowder, but with a single one of its constituents, charcoal. The Paraguayans soon made for them a gun, the Criollo, rifled for 150-pounders, and sent thousands of the shot back to w^hence they came.

Passing the military prison, an open space round which patrolled a few guards, and from which the guarded could readily have " made tracks,^^ we reached the cemetery. A. neat gate, bearing aloft the cross, is pierced in the stout brick wall ; the Brazilians and Argentines rest outside it, and to the west is a space set off by the Marshal- President for the benefit of the heretic engineers who fell at Riachuelo. The tombs were mostly new, with a mosaic of little red tiles by way of slab ; some, probably children's monuments, ap- peared very dwarfish. The inscriptions showed a people that carried warlike discipline even beyond the grave : one of them reads, " Sirvio a la Patria por veient aiios con lealdad i constancia.^' Evidently such a race wanted only the newest appliances of civilization, and such ministering angels as Whitworths and Armstrongs, Lahittes and Blakelys, to

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