At Valparaiso the adventurer of every clime have given each other the meeting. All tongues are spoken there, every branch of trade is carried on. The population is the quaintest amalgam of the most eccentric personalities, who have rushed from the most remote parts of the four quarters of the old world, to attack fortune in this city, the advanced sentinel of Transatlantic civilisation, and whose occult influence governs the Hispano-American republic.
Valparaiso, like nearly all the commercial centres of South America, is a pile of shapeless dens and magnificent palaces jostling each other, and hanging in abrupt clusters on the abrupt flanks of the three mountains.
At the period the event occurred which we are about to describe, the streets were narrow, dirty, deprived of air and sun. The paving, being perfectly ignored, rendered them perfect morasses, in which the wayfarer sank to the knee when the winter's rains had loosened the soil. This rendered the use of a horse indispensable, even for the shortest passage.
Deleterious exhalations incessantly escaped from these mud holes, heightened by the filth of every description which the daily cleaning of the inhabitants accumulated, while no one dreamed of draining these permanent abodes of pernicious fevers.
At the present day, we are told, this state of things has been altered, and Valparaiso no longer resembles itself. We should like to believe it; but the carelessness of the South American, so well known to us, compels us to be very circumspect in such a matter.
In one of the dirtiest and worst-famed streets of Valparaiso was a house which we ask the reader's permission to describe in a few words.
We are compelled at the outset, to confess that if the architect intrusted with its construction had shown himself more than sober in the distribution of the ornaments, he had built it perfectly to suit the trade of the various tenants destined in future to occupy it one after the other.
It was a clay-built hovel. The façade looked upon the Street de la Merced; the opposite side had an outlook of the sea, above which it projected for a certain distance upon posts.
This house was inhabited by an innkeeper. Contrary to the European buildings, which grow smaller the higher they rise from the ground, this house grew larger; so that the upper part was lofty and well lighted, while the shop and other ground floor rooms were confined and gloomy.
The present occupier had skilfully profited by this architectural arrangement to have a room made in the wall between the first and second floors, which was reached by a turning staircase, concealed in the masonry.