Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/291

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FROM ROZARIO TO CORRIENTES. 261

the Correntinos look upon it as a small Buenos Aires. I afterwards visited the Puerto^ on a sandy spit^ close north to the Arroyo de Goya. Here are the large white capitania and flagstaflP, and six or seven brick houses ; the rest are shedsj including a large graseria (where fat is boiled down), and a kind of chalet, which receives steamer-passengers. Carts and horses transport them to the Pueblo, a mile or so up stream, where an obelisk and white towers rise above the green orchards. It is an industrious commercial little hive of 3000 souls, who export their hides and wool, oranges and cheeses : the latter are famed through the land, and so are the "china^^ gii'ls^ who are said to press them by the simple process of supersession. The climate is feverish, and the place is too near the lowlands of the Sta. Luzia River.

Goya has been named of late, being the most southerly point reached by the Paraguayan invader, and it readily sub- mitted to 200 men. Both here and at La Esquina the soldiery, it is said, behaved roughly, and did not leave a good name. On the opposite bank is the Rio del Rey, where an old settlement was founded in 1748 and abandoned in 1813. This stream, even in our most modern maps, is confounded with a western branch, the Rio de San Geronimo.

Six leagues above Goya, near a long point, the Rincon de Soto, also called de los Sotos (of the Fools), is the large Saladero, formerly belonging to Mr. Samuel Lafone, of Montevideo, and afterwards to a Buenos Aires Company. We know it by its tall chimneys ; the better houses are whitewashed, the huts are of wattle and dab with dull sloping thatches, and the place of business has a zinc roof. A gaily dressed party of both sexes stands upon the water- edge marvelling at our size. The Paraguayans here billeted themselves, when it was managed by D. Emilio Quevedo and Mr. Thomas O^Connor, now of Paysandu. The latter had a narrow escape ; the Paraguayan officer