But in the nineteenth century, up to very recent times, it had an evil reputation for dirt and discomfort. A young English officer, who paid it a hurried visit shortly after the Revolution, remarks:[78] "The water is extremely impure, scarce, and consequently expensive. The town is badly paved and dirty, and the houses are the most comfortless abodes I ever entered. The walls, from the climate, are damp, mouldy, and discoloured. The floors are badly paved with bricks, which are generally cracked, and often in holes. The roofs have no ceiling, and the families have no idea of warming themselves except by huddling round a fire of charcoal, which is put outside the door until the carbonic acid gas has rolled away." He also remarked that provisions were very dear and that, in spite of high wages, labourers would be worse off than in England. Beef was sold in such a mangled state that English immigrants often refused to buy it. The lower classes of English and Irish at Buenos Aires were, he thought, in a very bad state and addicted to drink. Altogether the town cannot have been a pleasant place of residence in those days, and it was long before there was much improvement. Darwin, however, who visited Buenos Aires not long after Head and estimated the population at sixty thousand (Montevideo had then only fifteen thousand inhabitants), describes the outskirts as pretty and the plan of the city as "one of the most regular in the world."[79] Probably the laying out was done during the time of prosperity at the end of the eighteenth century, but the sanitary condition continued bad, and an Englishman[80] who visited it in 1852, says: "Buenos Aires! What a misnomer! The first thing that greeted our eyes on landing was the skinless carcase of a horse lying on the beach on one side of the landing-place; the second, another ditto on the other side; and the 'good air' of the town was the stench thereof.... There is something most delicious about the air of this place, notwithstanding the horrible stenches from the putrid flesh all about the town." He pays a tribute to the hospitality of the inhabitants, but the chief amenity of the modern town was absent, for he remarks: "Urquiza's residence at Palermo is only one room high, and is surrounded with a lot of porticoes. It was built by the wretch Rosas, and lies on a flat close to the river, with a grove of miserable-looking trees between it and the water."