Buenos Aires; a tremendous town, a "southern Paris," a New-World epitome. So much, so little I knew of it. It lay here, its heart not a half-hour's walk from our mooring. But the vastness of the rumoured hive, the heat, I daresay indolence too, prevented me from taking this first opportunity for walking into the strange streets. It was excessively hot, and that settled the matter. There was plenty to watch on the river and alongside: it would have been odd, if it had not proved so. So, swollen somewhat with the feeling that I was now a considerable seafarer, and not unpleased to be mistaken for one by the miscellaneous visitors who had by this examined the decks and accommodation--all doors locked--somewhat fruitlessly, but still loitered, I stayed idle.
Trenches will recur to their old inhabitants. The small coal in the yards here stood walled in with a breastwork of sandbags, built with tolerable skill upon the old familiar pattern of headers and stretchers and as I happened to be remarking upon this fact to the wireless man, interrupting his propaganda about a strike in which he personally would resist to the last, a little launch chanced past with the name _Ypres_ on her bows.
She was but one of an endless to and fro of small craft. The tall and airy passenger boats, at intervals, came by in brilliance. When there was a pause in this coming and going, and nothing more happening on the water than the snapping of the small yellow catfish at bread floating below the ship, I still felt a quiet and languid gratitude for the novelty of being where I was.
That gratitude was to be tempered soon. The plague of the mosquitoes of the docks had been painted dark enough for me during the days of approach; and when I got to bed, the threatened invasion had begun. Determining not to consider the question at all, I read deep in my pocket copy of Young's _Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality_, as in worse quarters many a time, and duly went to sleep like a philosopher.
Could this be Saint Valentine's Day? Here in a dreary looking dock with a surplus of sun but a seeming lack of oxygen, and only a sort of amphibious race as company? Newspapers were at any rate valentine enough. They were read with real care, football results being perhaps the consolation most sought.