Very sore and weary, the travellers reached Santiago on the 17th of March, only to encounter every kind of obstacle and annoyance in the attempt to carry out the object of their mission. The government had changed, and the party in power had no desire to come to an understanding with the Holy See. The people, indeed, received the envoys most enthusiastically, but Chile in 1824 was apparently much what I found it in 1885—a country of ardent believers ruled by atheists. Let some expert explain the problem, I cannot! For seven months Monsignor Muzi remained in Santiago, perseveringly trying to clear matters up and reach some _modus vivendi_ between Church and State. But his efforts were nullified by the hostility of the President and his supporters, and at last he had to acknowledge his defeat and withdraw from the conflict. The _Eloïse_ meanwhile had successfully rounded Cape Horn and reached Valparaiso, and on the 19th of October the Archbishop and his party embarked once more on the gallant little vessel and started for home. Of course no sailing vessel can pass through the twisting narrows and rocks of the Straits of Magellan, so for three weeks—surely the most miserable of their lives—those poor priests, children of Italy and the sun, shivered in the awful cold of those frozen regions, where the sea is the colour of cold steel, and the sailors, as they have often told me, come down from the deck at night with their garments frozen stiff, and have to work their way into them, still frozen stiff as boards, in the morning. My own travelling in that part of the world did not include the rounding of Cape Horn, but even the passage of the Straits, in a big liner, with the water smooth as glass, was such a freezingly wretched experience that, having made it once, the prospect of its repetition took something away from my eagerness to go home. But outside the Horn, with the Antarctic Ocean, unbroken from the South Pole, flinging its icy rollers against a little sailing vessel that took three weeks to beat up on the other side—_that_, the skippers have told me, furnishes merchant seamen with their best nightmares to their dying day! Most of the coal supply for the West Coast is carried by this route, and by the time it has reached the Horn the coal, loaded under the damp English skies, has ignited and the remainder of the trip is made with hatches battened down and the pleasing knowledge that a puff of air finding its way into the hold will send the whole mass into a blaze!