At last the provision lists were finished and we felt entitled to take a holiday, leaving the remainder of the work on the ship in the competent hands of Mr. Gillam; our special objects were to see the Easter Island collection in the museum at Santiago and get a glimpse of the Trans-Andine Railway. This part of our journeyings has nothing to do with the voyage of the _Mana_, and accounts of the ground covered have been given by much abler hands, notably by Lord Bryce in his _Impressions of South America_; it shall therefore be told in outline only. We left Talcahuano by the tri-weekly day express for Santiago; it took twelve hours to travel about 350 miles, but the Pullman car was luxurious, and we were able to see the country well. The line passes northward through the long fruitful plain between the Andes and the coast range, which constitutes the land of Chile, and crosses continually the streams which traverse it on their course from the mountains to the sea. The train stops from time to time at cheerful little towns, and finally at Santiago, which is a most attractive city, with a sense of quiet and yet cheerful dignity. There are but few streets at the end of which it is not possible to obtain a glimpse of the surrounding mountains, but they were scarcely either as near or impressive as descriptions had led us to expect. The first night of our residence in the capital we experienced an earthquake. I was already asleep when about 10.30 I was awakened by the shock; the light when turned on showed the chandeliers and pictures swinging in opposite directions, and one of the latter was still oscillating when the current was switched off eight or ten minutes later. There was a slighter recurrence at 3 a.m. The shock was stated to be the worst since the great earthquake of 1906, and numbers of people had, we found, rushed out into the streets and squares. It was generally agreed that familiarity in the case of earthquakes breeds not contempt but the reverse, and that shocks of which the new-comer thinks but little, fill those who know their possibilities with nervous alarm. In this case no great damage was done; the only fatalities occurred at Talca, a little place about half-way along the line by which we had come. When we called at the Legation the next day to express our thanks to the British Minister for the trouble taken about our stores, we were shown the cracks in the walls which were the result of the previous earthquake and the fresh additions made to them the night before. We had the good fortune at Santiago to become acquainted with Sir Edward and Lady Grogan. Sir Edward filled the post of military attaché for six of our South American legations, and I had heard at Buenos Aires much of the work and interests of Lady Grogan. She was the almost last Englishwoman whom I met till my return to my native land two years later, when I had the pleasure of renewing the acquaintance, this time