The shops do not open until nine or ten o’clock in the morning, close from five to seven to allow the proprietors and clerks to dine, and are then open again until midnight, as between eight and eleven o’clock at night most of the retail trading is done. The finest shops are in the arcades or _portales_, like the Palais Royal in Paris, and are brilliantly lighted with electricity. Here the ladies gather, swarming around the pretty goods like bees around the flowers, and of course the haughty and impertinent dons come also to stare at them. It seems to be considered a compliment, a mark of admiration, to stare at a woman, for she never turns away. To these nightly gatherings come all who have nothing serious to detain them, and the flirtations begun at the portales are the curse of the women of Santiago. It is not rude to address a lady who has returned your glance, and while she may repulse her admirer, she will nevertheless boast of the attention as a pronounced form of flattery. The shops are full of the prettiest sorts of goods, the most expensive diamonds, jewellery, and laces. The Santiagoans boast that everything that can be found in Paris can be purchased there, and one easily believes it to be true. There is plenty of money in Chili; the people have a refined taste and luxurious habits. Many of the private houses are palatial, and the toilets of the women are superb. The equipages to be seen in Santiago are equal to those of New York or London, and the Alameda, on pleasant afternoons, is crowded with handsome carriages, with liveried coachmen and footmen, like Central Park or Rotten Row. The Alameda is six hundred feet in width, broken by four rows of poplar-trees, and stretches the full length of the city--four miles--from “Santa Lucia” to the Exposition Park and Horticultural Gardens. In the centre is a promenade, while on either side is a drive-way one hundred feet wide. The promenade is dotted with a line of statues representing the famous men or commemorating the famous events in the history of Chili, a country which has assassinated or sent into exile some of her noblest sons, but never fails to perpetuate their memory in bronze or marble. On the Alameda, from three to five o’clock every afternoon during the season, several military bands are placed at intervals of half a mile or so, and the music calls out all the population to walk or drive. During the summer the music is given in the evening instead of the afternoon, when the portales are deserted for the out-door promenade. Fronting the Alameda are the finest palaces in the city, magnificent dwellings of carved sandstone often one or two hundred feet square, with the invariable patio and its fountains and flowers in the centre. Houses which cost half a million dollars to build and a quarter of a million to furnish [Illustration: SANTA LUCIA.]