In the year 1889, after five weeks of ocean tossing, the steamer on
which I was a passenger anchored in the River Plate, off Buenos
Ayres.
Nothing but water and sky was to be seen, for the coast was
yet twenty miles away, but the river was too shallow for the steamer
to get nearer. Large tugboats came out to us, and passengers and
baggage were transhipped into them, and we steamed ten miles nearer
the still invisible city. There smaller tugs awaited us and we were
again transhipped. Sailing once more toward the land, we soon caught
sight of the Argentine capital, but before we could sail nearer the
tugs grounded. There we were crowded into flat-bottomed, lug-sailed
boats for a third stage of our landward journey. These boats conveyed
us to within a mile of the city, when carts, drawn by five horses,
met us in the surf and drew us on to the wet, shingly beach. There
about twenty men stood, ready to carry the females on their backs on
to the dry, sandy shore, where was the customs house. The population
of the city we then entered was about six hundred thousand souls.
After changing the little gold I carried for the greasy paper
currency of the country, I started out in search of something to eat.
Eventually I found myself before a substantial meal. At a table in
front of me sat a Scotsman from the same vessel. He had arrived
before me (Scotsmen say they are always before the Englishmen) and
was devouring part of a leg of mutton. This, he told me, he had
procured, to the great amusement of Boniface, by going down on all
fours and baa-ing like the sheep of his native hills. Had he waited
until I arrived he might have feasted on lamb, for my voice was not
so gruff as his. He had unconsciously asked for an old sheep. I think
the Highlander in that instance regretted that he had preceded the
Englishman.
How shall I describe the metropolis of the Argentine, with its one-
storied, flat-roofed houses, each with grated windows and centre
patio? Some of the poorer inhabitants raise fowls on the roof,
which gives the house a barnyard appearance, while the iron-barred
windows below strongly suggest a prison. Strange yet attractive
dwellings they are, lime-washed in various colors, the favorite
shades seeming to be pink and bottle green. Fires are not used except
for cooking purposes, and the little smoke they give out is quickly
dispersed by the breezes from the sixty-mile-wide river on which the
city stands.
The Buenos Ayres of 1889 was a strange place, with its long, narrow
streets, its peculiar stores and many-tongued inhabitants. There is
the dark-skinned policeman at the corner of each block sitting
silently on his horse, or galloping down the cobbled street at the
sound of some revolver, which generally tells of a life gone out.
Arriving on the scene he often finds the culprit flown.
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