"The city has been cut out of the woods, and as we enter it we are reminded of the frontier settlements of our wooded Northwest. Its houses are scattered along wide streets with many recurring gaps and here and there a stray stump. The streets are a mass of black mud through which huge oxen drag heavy carts by yokes fastened to their horns. At one place the sidewalk is of concrete, at another it is of wood, and a little further on it is of mud. Many of the houses are built of sheets of corrugated iron, their walls wrinkled up like a washboard, and all have roofs of this material. A few are painted, but nearly all are of the galvanized, slaty color of the metal as it comes from the factory. "There is plenty of building space, but when you ask the price of vacant lots you find that property is high. What in the United States would be a $50 shanty is here worth $500, and a good business corner will sell for several thousands of dollars. "Punta Arenas has one residence which would be considered a mansion in Washington city. This house, however, is the only one of its kind in Punta Arenas. Most of the dwellings are one-story structures which in the United States could be built for from $500 to $2,000. Many of the poorer houses are occupied by rich men; indeed, Punta Arenas has as many rich men as any frontier town of its size. It has thirty-three men each of whom owns or controls from 25,000 to 2,500,000 acres of land. Each has tens of thousands of sheep, and the wool clip of some of these sheep farmers is worth more than the annual salary of the President of the United States. "The citizens of Punta Arenas come from all parts of the world. Some of the richest people are Russians; others are Scotchmen who have come from the Falkland Islands to engage in sheep farming; among them also are treacherous Spaniards, smooth-tongued Argentines and hard-looking brigands from Chile. The lower classes are chiefly shepherds and seamen, and among them are as many rough characters as are to be found in our mining camps of the West." That extract caused you to be more interested in the place, but still the reference to rough characters made you feel that if you were going ashore it would be better to leave your money on the ship and not go alone. When the fleet came in sight of the town all the glasses in each ship that could be spared were in constant use. You saw a gathering of dwellings, almost entirely one-story structures and all of a slate color. There was one tower in the centre of the place. The town stretched for nearly a mile and a half along a sloping hill, nearly flat in the foreground, and it extended back in a straggling way for about three-quarters of a mile. Back of the town on rising ground was a belt of burned timber, bleak and forbidding, and then came the sharp rise of the ground into a low range of mountains, eight or ten miles away and about 1,500 or 1,800 feet high, with patches of snow here and there in sheltered nooks.