30 8 Voijage of the No vara. 



Eveu more agreeable than the evenings we spent among 

 the patrician circles of Santiago, were those which we passed 

 with an Austrian gentleman. Dr. Herzl, settled here some 

 ten years, and with some German-Spanish families. Here 

 everlasting politics, or rather party squabbles, had not, as in 

 the native salons, banished music and song, the latter being 

 cherished as a means of rising out of the hurly-burly, and 

 keeping the annoyances of public life, for the moment at 

 least, at arm's length. 



In Chilean salons nothing was talked but politics ; here 

 the bent of conversation was towards literature and art, and, 

 climax of the evening, the beloved melodies of oiu* native 



land. Madame Z , a native of Madrid, a second time 



married to a German, is a downright musical prodigy. In 

 her youth she had studied at the Consej^vatoire in Paris in 

 company with Madame Malibran, and although now 54, and 

 the mother of 16 children, she still entrances by her clear 

 ringing voice, and the charm of her exquisitely appreciative 

 intonation. 



The chief engineer and director of the southern railway 

 (Ferro Canil del Sur), a North American gentleman named 

 Evans, a graduate of West Point, had the kindness to invite 

 some members of the Expedition to visit the Maipii Bridge, 

 distant some 17 miles from Santiago, and accompanied them 

 in person on their excursion to this the most interesting en- 

 gineering work of the line. We set off at 1 p. m. by one of 

 the ordinary trains. The road is intended to unite Santiago 



