The city has a population of nearly 250,000, but, as some one else has remarked, “As the principal port of the west coast, and, in a way, the ‘downtown’ for the capital and the rest of Chile, Valparaiso seems more important than its mere population would indicate, and, although the newspapers and street signs are in Spanish and Spanish is the language generally spoken, it has little of the look of the old Spanish-American town.” A large element of the population is foreign. The Germans are said to have the largest colony and the Italians and French to come next in order. These are mostly retail merchants of the better class; but it is here also that the men live who design and control the vast nitrate and mining enterprises in the north and the capitalists who finance the big industrial projects and railway development, the exporters and importers, bankers, brokers, and insurance men, and among these the ten or twelve thousand English in the city predominate. The better-educated class of Chileans speak English as well as Spanish and French. The French have almost a monopoly of the retail trade having to do with fashionable apparel and luxuries, for Paris has always been the Mecca of the smart set here and in Santiago, just as it has in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Although there are parts of the city that still retain something of the old-world aspect, the buildings generally are modern—many of them new, since it had to be largely rebuilt after the great earthquake in 1906, which was relatively as disastrous there as the one in San Francisco of the same year was to our principal Pacific port. There are few tall buildings and no skyscrapers, yet the main business street, the Calle Victoria, which parallels the Malecon almost the entire length, presents an array of government buildings, banks, hotels, theaters, cafés, retail shops, and office buildings larger and more substantial and elaborate than can be seen almost anywhere in cities of that size. The shops are of good size, and leave nothing to be desired in the way of assortment and quality of their stocks. Probably the most attractive of all the streets is the Avenida Brazil, which is at once a shaded boulevard, business thoroughfare, and fashionable promenade. There are trolley cars—with women conductors—and arc lights, libraries, first-class educational institutions, beautiful parks and plazas where they have public band concerts in the evenings, attractive residence districts, and near by, at Viña del Mar, there are sea bathing, tennis, racing, football, golf, country clubs, and a first-class hotel for those who are not so fortunate as to have their own houses. Only about sixty miles away (though it is farther by the railroad, which has to make a détour to get through the coast range) is the capital, Santiago, the real metropolis of the country. “Santiago, the Andean city of the snow white crown,” as Marie Robinson Wright was moved to describe it—