SANTIAGO. 221 



inferior agents. And this is probably one of the reasons for the delay 

 of the very necessary coinage of small money. 



From the mint we went to the Consulado, where I meant to have 

 been at the very beginning of the sitting. I had previously asked 

 the Director if there was any objection to a woman going thither. 

 He told me his mother and sister had gone on the first day, and that 

 it was open to strangers ; but in case the unusual appearance of a 

 lady should startle the members, he would speak to the President. 

 Mr. De Roos and I went thither, unhappily without any person to 

 tell us who was who. However, we knew that the President was 

 Albano, the deputy from Talca, and the Vice-president Camillo Hen- 

 riquez, the editor of the " Mercurio de Chile," and an occasional poet. 



We entered just as the house was passing a resolution, that in dis- 

 cussing the project of laws, the consent of two-thirds of the members 

 should be necessary for the passing each article. There were not 

 above twenty members present, and about half a dozen lookers-on 

 besides ourselves. The chamber is a very fine one, from its great 

 size. At one end is the President's seat, under a very handsome 

 canopy of blue, red, and white, enriched with gold. When the 

 Director appears this is his place, and the President sits on his right 

 hand ; the Deputies sit on benches close to the wall on either side, 

 the Secretaries and Vice-president at a table immediately before the 

 President, and the spectators on benches like those of the members, 

 onlv at a greater distance from the President. After all, I thought it 

 was a strange position for an English woman and an English mid- 

 shipman to be assisting at the deliberation of a national representative 

 assembly in Chile. But what in Addison's time would have been 

 romance, is now, every day, matter of fact. I was in the Mahratta 

 capital while it was protected by an English force ; I have attended 

 a protestant church in the Piazza de Trajano in Rome ; I sat as a 

 spectator in an English court of justice in Malta : and what wonder 

 that I should now listen to the free deliberations of a national repre- 

 sentative meeting in a Spanish colony ? Perhaps the world never 

 experienced so great a change as in the last thirty-five years : that all 

 should have been for the better, no one, who reflects on the imperfect 



