SANTIAGO. 99] 
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 Jaws, 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 lJookers-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, 
only 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 al/ 
should have been for the better, no one, who reflects on the imperfect 
