[Foundry at Ibicuy, Destroyed During the War.]
UP THE PARANA AND IN PARAGUAY.
CONCLUDING PAPER.
One day—to return to our traveler and his personal experiences—M. Forgues makes the acquaintance of a Swiss who resides at Paraguari, a small interior town distant about twenty-five leagues from Asuncion. His new acquaintance invites him to go with him to Paraguari, but before complying with the invitation M. Forgues crosses the river and rides into the territory of Gran Chaco as far as the Quinta de la Miseria, situated about two miles and a half from the river-bank. The owner of this farm, Mequelain, a French pioneer, his wife and three servants, had been surprised and murdered by the Chaco Indians a short while before the arrival of M. Forgues in Asuncion. The quinta is on the edge of a vast plain. The unfortunate Mequelain had surrounded his house with ditches and a small fence of posts. Besides this, he had built a sort of observatory from which to watch the movements of the Indians. But his precautions, as the end showed, proved useless. The farm was occupied by new tenants at the time of M. Forgues's visit, and the bodies of the five victims were buried in one of the ditches. The Quinta de la Miseria derives its gloomy name from the tragic event that had given it its melancholy prominence in the minds of the people of Asuncion. To reach Paraguari our traveler avails himself of the railroad which extends between that town and the capital. The railroad-station presents a lively scene with its crowd of savage-looking natives thronging it. In connection with this station M. Forgues mentions a curious circumstance—that in order to prevent the rush of the multitude to the cars on the departure of the train the station-master has ingeniously replaced gates and fences, which might be climbed easily, with brushes steeped in pitch and tar, so disposed as to bar the passage. As the Paraguayan women hold cleanliness to be one of the cardinal virtues, they religiously avoid these defiling brushes for fear of soiling their garments. The cars are built on the most approved American model. The train, furthermore, has two platform-cars attached to it, which are reserved exclusively for the gratuitous use of the poor, who are permitted to ride on them with as much as they can carry in the way of bundles and other goods. Sometimes the platforms are so crowded that they are lost to sight under the passengers' heads and legs. Another feature of railway travel in Paraguay—for a foreigner a sensation—is to observe a woman clad in the Arcadian simplicity of a single garment enter a car and take a seat opposite you or alongside of you with the most unconstrained air imaginable.
The train on its way to Paraguari passes Trinidad and many other stations. The station-houses are all small structures covered with tile roofs. At Luque, a village where the passengers stop for refreshments, the women of the place flock at the windows and offer for sale embroideries of their own invention worked on tulle or on a special kind of netting, while the venders of lunches appear, not with the traditional fried oysters, fried chickens or sandwiches of our own favored land, but with bottles of fresh milk and chiapa, a kind of bread made from manioc, among the ingredients of which are starch and eggs, and for which Luque is famous. The engineer of the train, an Englishman, is a person who is as important in his way as is the Brazilian minister in his. At Luque he descends from his locomotive to chat with a friend on the platform. Time—or what would be "time" elsewhere—is up, but our Englishman continues to talk, notwithstanding that after the utterance of impatient cries the passengers leave the cars in wrath to crowd around him and overwhelm him with abusive words. An admirable representative of English phlegm, he finishes his conversation at his ease, looks at his watch, climbs in a leisurely way to his position on the engine and puts the train in motion. There is no danger of collision with any other train, however, for this train is the only one on the line. It leaves Asuncion every morning, moving at an average rate of fifteen miles an hour, and arrives at Paraguari some time during the day, at the will of the engineer. Returning from Paraguari the same day, it reaches Asuncion, remarks M. Forgues, when it pleases Heaven that it shall do so.
