The first pleasant impression that I received in Santiago was made by the Anglo-American Club. It was situated on a narrow, dirty street behind the Spanish theater, in a very low, disreputable part of the city, and did not impress me, at first sight, as being likely to afford even the ordinary necessaries and comforts of life, much less the luxuries and conveniences suggested to the mind of a city man by the word "club." But external appearance in a Spanish-American city is often deceptive, and it was so in this case. Opposite the rear or stage entrance of the theater, where half a dozen soldiers of the Ninth Infantry were cooking breakfast in the street, my ragged Cuban guide turned into a dark vaulted passage which looked as if it might be one of the approaches to a jail. "It can't be possible," I said to myself, "that this damp, gloomy tunnel is the entrance to a club; the guide must have misunderstood the directions given him." But the guide was right. At a distance of thirty-five or forty feet from the street the vaulted passage opened into a paved patio, or court,--a sort of large, square well,--in the center of which stood a green, thrifty, broad-leaved banana-tree, fifteen or twenty feet in height. From the corners of this court, on the side opposite the street entrance, two broad flights of steps led up to what seemed to be a hanging garden of greenery and flowers, shut in on all sides by piazzas and galleries. Climbing one of these flights of steps, I found myself in a second and higher patio, shaded by large mango-and mamonilla-trees, brightened by borders of flowering shrubs and plants, and filled with the fragrance of roses, geraniums, and pomegranate blossoms. The transition from the heat, filth, and sickening odors of the narrow street to the seclusion and shady coolness of this flower-scented patio was as delightful as it was sudden and unexpected. I could hardly have been more surprised if I had entered what I supposed to be a Siberian forwarding prison, and found myself in a conservatory of tropical plants and flowers. Around three sides of the patio were spacious piazzas in two tiers, and upon these piazzas opened the living-rooms of the club,--about twenty in number,--like the boxes or stalls in the galleries of a European theater. On the southern side of the patio was a large dining-room, and beyond this, occupying the whole width of the building and overlooking the street from a projecting balcony, was the reading-room. This was a high, cool, spacious apartment comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, pictures, maps, hanging book-cases, a big library table covered with periodicals, and an American piano. The periodicals were not of very recent date, and the piano was somewhat out of tune, but I was so delighted with the shady, flower-bordered courtyard and the comfort and apparent cleanliness of the club as a whole that I felt no disposition to be hypercritical. To find such a