At the Tea Garden Restaurant it is possible to lunch by the side of a lake, with ripening grape-bunches above to throw their reflections in the soup, and with the falling petals of orange-blossom floating daintily past the steaming cutlets, while the music of the ducks blends admirably with the clatter of the table weapons. With really good cooking and attentive service added to these side attractions, what more could one want!
But the proprietors of the restaurant are nothing if not enterprising. They give the wayfarer something even beyond an excellent meal. At the end of the repast each guest is presented with a ticket that entitles him to a free cab-ride to the tramway terminus. The idea is admirable. Nothing is wanting but the cabs! At all events, when I had concluded lunch there the surface of the fine avenue was innocent of any vehicle, and continued so until the walk to the car was accomplished. But the courtesy of the offer had been effectual, and a certain sense of obligation remained.
The bathing-places of Poçitos and Ramirez are akin in many respects to these inland resorts. By the side of the sea here are fewer blossoms and rather smaller eucalyptus groves, but a greater number of open-air restaurants and one or two quite imposing hotels. Indeed, Ramirez, the nearer of the two, is endowed with a really fine casino, that faces the shoreward end of the pier, and that has by its side the spacious and well-timbered public park.
Poçitos occupies the next bay, and is notable for its lengthy esplanade and for the very pleasant houses that give upon the semicircular sweep. This bay, moreover, is the first that has, so to speak, turned its back upon the river and has faced the open ocean. As a token, the waters are tinged with a definite blue, and the air holds a genuine sting of salt that rapidly dies away when passing up-stream away from here. To the Buenos Airen, who enthusiastically patronises the place, Poçitos is delightful, if for no other reason than the sense of contrast to his own surroundings that it affords him. Not that he has any reason to grumble at the river frontier of the rich alluvial soil, from out of which his fortunes have been built. But here, in place of the soft, stoneless mud, is bright sand, and genuine rocks, piled liberally all over the shore, that shelter crabs, and pools that hold fish of the varieties that refuse to breathe in any other but guaranteed salt water. So it is that the summer season sees the long rows of tents and bathing machines crowded and overflowing with the Uruguayans and the host of visitors from across the river.
Both Ramirez and Poçitos are within the range of the ubiquitous tramcar. But this very efficient service, not content with its excursion of half a dozen miles and more on the ocean side of Montevideo, runs in the opposite direction completely round the port bay, and performs the yet more important journey to Villa del Cerro, the small town that lies at the foot of the hill that is so closely associated with Montevideo and its affairs. A far shorter route to this latter place, however, is by the busy little steam ferry that puffs straight across the bay, and that starts faithfully at every hour, as promised by the timetable, although, if that hour coincides with the one specified, the event may be accepted as a fortunate accident.
Its most patriotic inhabitant could not claim loveliness for Villa del Cerro. The existence of the spot is mainly due to the presence of some neighbouring saladeros, or meat-curing factories, and thus the small town presents the aspects of the more humble industrial centres. There are two or three regular streets, it is true, that contain a few houses with some faint pretensions to importance. Upon the balconies of these the local señoritas are wont to gather of an evening. They are obviously a little starved in such matters as romance, and a little fearful lest their eye language should lose its eloquence through too long a disuse. Thus the advent of any passing stranger whatever suffices to cause a certain flutter and excitement in the balconies above.
Outside these main streets the pattern of the town has been left much to the discretion of its most lowly inhabitants. Buildings composed of unexpected material sprout up from the earth in unexpected places. Earth, boards, tin, and fragments of stone are amongst the commonest of these, although there are a certain number, stiffened by bricks, whose comparatively commonplace exterior looks smug and respectable by the side of the rest.
Mounting upwards, the architecture of the outskirts comes as something of a relief, since its simplicity is crude and absolute to the point of excluding any jarring possibilities.
The ranchos here are composed of nothing beyond loose fragments of rock piled one on top of the other, with an odd hole here and there that serves for window or door, frequently for both.
At one point in the midst of these primitive stone dwellings a small group of scantily clothed boys are playing football, the implement of their game being an old sheepskin rolled into the nearest imitation to a globe to which its folds will consent and held together roughly with string—one more instance of the spreading triumph of football, that wonderful game that seems to conquer its surroundings and to implant itself firmly throughout the world entire.