Her ability as a manager is remarkable, and she directs every detail, receiving weekly reports from ten or twelve superintendents who have immediate charge of affairs. While she is generous to profligacy, she requires a strict account of every dollar earned or spent upon her vast estates, and is very sharp at driving a bargain. One of her Scotch superintendents told me that there was no use in trying to get ahead of the señora. “You cannot move a stone or a stick but she knows it,” he said. In addition to her landed property and her mines she owns much city real estate, from which her rentals amount to several hundred thousand dollars a year. She is also the principal stockholder in the largest bank in Santiago. Not long ago she presented the people of that city with a park of one hundred acres, and a race-course adjoining it. [Illustration: SEÑORA COUSINO.] Fabulous stories of the señora’s extravagance are told. A million of dollars is a trifle to a woman whose income is so enormous, and there is nothing in the world that she will not buy if she happens to want it. She does not care much for art, but has a collection of diamonds that is very large and valuable, and she sometimes appears loaded down with them. Usually she looks quite shabby, as she has no taste or ambition for dress, and her party toilets, which are ordered from Paris, are seldom worn. Of late she has been a sufferer from sciatica, which has not only destroyed the señora’s own pleasure, but has seriously impaired the comfort of those who have relations with her. Although a comparatively young woman, being somewhere between forty-five and fifty years of age, she declares that she will never marry again; and there is not a man in Chili who has the courage to ask her. Not long since she took a fancy to a young German with a very blond beard and hair, and insisted that he should give up his business and make his home with her. The inducements she offered were sufficient, and for several months the young man has been tied to her apron-strings, having the ostensible employment of a private secretary. But the señora is very fickle, and will probably throw him overboard, as she has many others, when the whim seizes her.