The Crœsus of South America is a woman, Donna Isadora Cousino, of Santiago, Chili, and there are few men or women in the world richer than she. There is no end to her money and no limit to her extravagance, and the people call her the Countess of Monte Cristo. She traces her ancestry back to the days of the Conquest, and has the record of the first of her fathers who landed early on the shores of the New World. His family was already famous, for his sire fought under the ensign of the Arragons before the alliance with Castile. But the branch of the family that remained in Spain was lost in the world’s great shuffle two or three centuries ago, and none of them distinguished themselves sufficiently to get their portraits into the collection which Señora Cousino has made of the lineage she claims. Like her own, the ancestors of her late husband came over in the early days, and in the partition of the lands and spoils of the Conquest both got a large share, which they kept and increased by adding the portions given to their less thrifty and less enterprising associates, until the two estates became the largest, most productive, and most valuable of all the haciendas of Chili, and were finally united into one by the marriage, twenty-four years ago, of the late Don and his surviving widow. While he lived he was considered the richest man in Chili, and she the richest woman, for their property was kept separate, the husband managing his estate and the wife her own, and the people say that she was altogether the better “administrator” of the two. This fact he acknowledged in his will when he bequeathed all of his possessions to her, and piled his Pelion upon her Ossa; so that she has millions of acres of land, millions of money; flocks and herds that are numbered by the hundreds of thousands; coal, copper, and silver mines; acres of real estate in the cities of Santiago and Valparaiso; a fleet of iron steamships, smelting-works, a railroad, and various other trifles in the way of productive property, which yield her an income of several millions a year that she tries very hard to spend, and under the circumstances succeeds as well as could be expected. From her coal-mines alone Señora Cousino has an income of eighty thousand dollars a month; and there is no reason why this should not be perpetual, as they are the only source in all South America from which fuel can be obtained, and those who do not buy of her have to import their coal from Great Britain. She has a fleet of eight iron steamships, of capacities varying from two thousand to three thousand six hundred tons, which were built in England, and are used to carry the coal up the coast as far as Panama, and around the Strait of Magellan to Buenos Ayres and Montevideo. At Lota she has copper and silver smelting-works, besides coal-mines, and her coaling ships bring ore down the coast as a return cargo from upper Chili, Peru, and Ecuador; while those that go to Buenos