which stood on the window-sill, when I entered. I was not surprised,
under such provocation to good fellowship, to receive a warm welcome. My
mercantile friend was in the best possible humor, for times, he said, were
very good. Every one at Valparaiso was making his fortune. It was the
epoch of the gold excitement. Large fortunes had already been made. The
contents of the shops and warehouses had, as soon as the gold discovery
became known, been emptied into every vessel in the harbor, and sent to
San Francisco. The lucky speculators had gained five or six hundred per
cent. profit for their ventures of preserved and dried fruits, champagne,
other wines and liquors, Madeira nuts and the most paltry stuff
imaginable. In five months some of the Valparaiso merchants had cleared
five hundred thousand dollars. The excitement was still unabated. Shippers
were still loading and dispatching their goods daily for San Francisco.
Many were going there themselves, and hardly a clerk could be kept at
Valparaiso at any salary, however large.

The day was brilliantly bright, and the air so pure and bracing that it
did the lungs good to breathe. So I made my way out of counting-house and
street for a walk. I ascended the dry, crumbling hills which with long,
deep gullies and breaks in them, and friable soil, looked as if they were
ready to tumble into pieces at the first shake of one of those earthquakes
so frequent in the country. On the road, chained gangs of surly convicts
were at work, and some smart-looking soldiers, in blue and white, came
marching along! Caravans of mules, laden with goods, produce and water
casks, trotted on, and here and there rode a dashing Chilian cavalier on
his prancing steed, or a dapper citizen on his steady cob. In a ravine
between the dry hills there trickled the smallest possible stream. Above,
some water carriers were slowly filling their casks, while the mules
patiently waited for their burdens; below, was a throng of washerwomen,
beating their clothes upon the stones, just moistened by the scant water
which flowed over them, and interchanging Spanish Billingsgate with each
other and a gang of man-of-war sailors.

Frightened away by the stony stare of the English occupant from an
imposing-looking residence on the top of the hill, I crossed the road and
entered the private hospital. Around a quadrangle, laid out in gardens
beds there was a range of low two story buildings. Some bleached sailors,
in du