The new hotel, in the eyes of foreigners who have been compelled to stop at the old ones, is the finest ornament in Santiago. It is a magnificent structure, with three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furniture from Paris, and a five thousand dollar cook from the same place. All the rooms have grates for fires--which is an innovation--and are furnished as handsomely as any of the hotels in New York, while the restaurant is as good as Delmonico’s. Of course there must be some oddity about the place--it would not be suited to the country if there were not--and here it is that the bar is placed in the café where the ladies lunch. It is the only hotel bar in South America; and the proprietor, who wanted to introduce all the modern improvements, was rather bewildered in selecting the location of this one. It is a gorgeous affair of silver and crystal, and the ladies admire it as much as do the men. At first they were disposed to walk up and say, “The same for me, if you please,” with their brothers and husbands, but have been convinced that the proper form is to sit at the tables and take their drinks there. To see a lady drinking a cocktail in the bar-room of the Grand Central of Santiago may startle the prohibitionist who goes there, but it is quite as much the fashion as is the sucking of mint-juleps through a straw on the balconies of a Long Branch hotel. The Chillano is the Yankee of South America--the most active, enterprising, ingenious, and thrifty of the Spanish-American race--aggressive, audacious, and arrogant, quick to perceive, quick to resent, fierce in disposition, cold-blooded, and cruel as a cannibal. He dreams of conquest. He has only a strip of country along the Pacific coast, so narrow that there is scarcely room enough to write its name upon the map, hemmed in on the one side by the eternal snows that crown the Cordilleras, and on the other side by six thousand miles of sea. He has been stretching himself northward until he has stolen all the sea-coast of Bolivia, with her valuable nitrate deposits, all the guano that belonged to Peru, and contemplates soon taking actual possession of both those republics. He has been reaching southward by diplomacy as he did northward by war; and under a recent treaty with the Argentine Republic he has divided Patagonia with that nation, taking to himself the control of that valuable international highway, the Strait of Magellan, and the unexplored country between the Andes and the ocean, with thousands of islands along the Pacific coast whose resources are unknown. By securing the strait, Chili acquired control of steam navigation in the South Pacific, and has established a colony and fortress at Punta Arenas by which all vessels must pass.