crescentic beach, overlooked by numerous hills, most of which also are studded thickly with houses standing on terraces, rising above each other to the height of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty feet. A citizen of Valparaiso relieved me from the annoyances to which strangers are usually subjected by importunate boatmen and hotel runners. Landing at a fine mole, of three excellent hotels, the Union, Aubrey, and Santiago, the first was selected for a brief residence, and fully sustained the recommendation given of it by an American resident, for comfort and attention. CHAPTER X. : CITY OF VALPARAISO-PUBLIC MORALS--PUBLIC BUILDINGS-PANTHEON-PROTESTANT CEMETERY-FIRES AND FIRE INSURANCE-CURRENCY-POPULATION-SCHOOLS-HOSPI TALS. THE plan of the city of Valparaiso was determined by necessity, not design. Embracing the semicircular harbor to which reference has been made, is a correspondingly shaped sierra, a range of hills of from twelve hundred to fourteen hundred feet high. These hills, fifteen or sixteen in number, are partially separated from each other by ravines called quebradas, and they are sufficiently distinct to have received special names, to wit: Cerro Alegre, Cerro de la Concepcion, Cerro del Baron, Cerro de Bellavista, Cerro de Yungai, Cerro de la Cordil lera, &c.; while others, the usual resorts of sailors when ashore, have borrowed an English nautical phraseology, and are known among foreign mariners as the foretop, maintop, mizzentop. However experienced Jack may be in surmounting difficulties, climbing into these altitudes proves dangerous, and he often comes down with a mortifying reminder that his lonely bunk below deck is safer than a more social hammock aloft. Some of the hills are deeply seamed with gullies; others present plateaus which the hand of art has formed into terraces made accessible by steep winding paths and stairways. Long since the foot of the sierra probably dipped boldly into the waters of the bay, and was washed by ocean swells; but centuries of disintegration furnished debris of stone and earth, which has been washed from the hills by rain-torrents, and thus has been gradually formed a crescentric level belt along the water's edge, two miles in length, and of varying width, on which the business part of the city has been built. So narrow is this beach between the rocky buttress of the Cerro de la Concepcion and the water line, that but a single street is found there, which, being near the centre of the elongated city, may be compared to the contracted middle of an hour-glass held horizontally; while the expanded parts of the city, extending east and west from its waist, find a similitude in the enlarged bulbs of the glass. The west end-el Puerto, the Port-is the older part of Valparaiso, where wholesale business is transacted, and where are also found the Intendencia, or local government house, the custom-house and public stores. The east end of this lower part of the city. is the more modern, over which business improvements are extending, and is called the Almendral, from an almond grove that once beautified the spot. From the contracted middle, streets radiate east and west; more numerous and widely spread, however, to the east, over the Almendral, than to the west, over El Puerto, the former being larger. These streets are traversed at right angles and at unequal distances by cross streets, in most instances, indeed, mere alleys, which are little else than less precipitous continuations of the gorges of the adjacent hills. Commerce has appropriated the greater part of this level space to its own use, hence parts of the adjoining heights have been sought for as residences; and there, on ledge and hill-side, on projecting rock, and along the rims of ragged gullies, citizens have built dwellings, which, however picturesque the panorama they present from a distance, rising above each other in successive tiers like a great amphitheatre, yet are, when scrutinized closely, a confused assemblage of indifferent buildings, in dangerous and dirty localities; tottering in many instances on the brinks of precipices of a hundred feet, and in others overlooking ravines of filth which would prove sources of pestilence but for the daily hurricanes that sweep over the Sierra, and disperse the malaria at one season, and the torrents of rain which at another wash away accumulated nuisances, threatening, too, the miserable hovels that stand on their verge. An exception to this description must be made of the Cerro Alegre, improved as it is with tasteful cottages, and terraced and adorned with flower-gardens and shrubbery; where English, German, and |