"I rode past the church where this calamity occurred, but did not care to enter it, as there was nothing interesting in its architecture, and I have no feeling of morbid curiosity. I was more interested in the streets and the houses, the long rows of tall poplars that lined the streets, and the flower-gardens visible at almost every step. The poplar was introduced from Mendoza; the inhabitants say that along with the poplar came the goitre, as not a case of the disease was known until the exotic shade-trees were planted and began their growth in their new home. [Illustration: A STREET SCENE.] "In the middle hours of the day I found the streets almost deserted, but they are busy enough in the morning and towards sunset. Daybreak brings a crowd of peons from the country with vegetables, fruit, chickens, milk, and other edibles for sale; their shouting is loud and continuous, as they cry their wares from house to house or walk up and down the market-places. A great quantity of freshly cut _alfalfa_ (a variety of clover) is brought from the country and sold for feeding stock. It is piled on the back of mule or horse so that the animal is completely covered; you might easily imagine yourself looking at a haycock which had suddenly acquired the power of locomotion. There are droves of pack-mules; trains of carts with their wheels cut from a log, and creaking as if in dire distress; priests in sombre black, and men and women in variegated garments, all combining to form an animated picture. As the sun rises above the Andes and ascends in the heavens the crowd thins away, and long before noon there is an almost painful air of stillness over the whole scene. "Santiago lies in a valley between two ranges of the Andes chain, and about eighteen hundred feet above the level of the sea. Consequently it has both sunrise and sunset over the mountains; the former on the great range and the latter over the western Cordillera. There is an interesting period of the sunset--beginning when the city first comes under the shadow of the western mountains, and ending when the last rays leave the snow-capped mountain peaks in the east. The colors of the rainbow are perceptible in a sunset under favorable conditions; the tints change with the shadow, and we have yellow, vermilion, violet, green, purple, and other hues, in succession and combination, closing with a bright blaze and halo from the crests of the mountains. The last light of day comes reflected from these mountains in the east, and not from the west, where we are accustomed to see it in other cities and in other parts of the globe. Nature seems to be reversed in this most southerly capital of the continent.