Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/74

 stuffed leather that looked like biscuits over-done, and the bow and stroke-oar, each armed with a boat hook, made desperate dives at piles and stairs to check her headway.

The gruffness was all put on, however. He would come up to us as we landed, laying his big, honest head in the hand of one and giving his paw to another, while he winked at a third and wagged his tail vociferously as the last one out of the boat came over the cap-sill. Then he would draw back from the group, sit down, open his mouth and look a request for money. Usually each of us gave him a "dump." He would close his teeth on the coin, wave a goodbye with his tail, and walk away to the town.

He patronised two butchers, a baker, and two cafés. At the butcher's he bought beef or mutton. He never ate pork. He always selected some choice cut, with plenty of juice and not too much bone in it. He liked a little bone for medico-chemical reasons probably. From the butcher's he would go to the baker's or one of the cafés, and purchase either plain bread or sweet cake, either or both as his taste or his means dictated, and then he would lie down in some quiet corner and eat his breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, like a christian.

I wanted to tell you about his habits and peculiarities first, you know, so that you might feel acquainted with him.

We were all going to dine at Henry Caldwell's one night just after we arrived. Henry was a good-hearted, whole-souled fellow, who liked nothing better than to have his friends come to see him. He was a lumber merchant. His partner, Don Somebody-or-other, I forget his name, lived away down in the Patagonian woods, near the German city of Port Montt, where he cut lumber and sent it up to Valparaiso, and Henry attended there to its sale.

Caldwell's home was a snug little house on Concepcion Hill, right up in

the air three hundred feet above the lower town, and not half that distance back from where Cochrane street would have been had its location marked the summit instead of the base-line of the precipitous front of the hill. A zig-zag path, for mules and foot-travelers only, ran up the face of the bluff.

David Page and I were the only officers going from the ship that evening. Harry Finn, once on the stage in Boston, (you remember his father, the great comedian, dead long ago, a man of immense dramatic genius in his day and generation) was at that time in commercial business in Valparaiso, and three Chilean gentlemen were to complete the party. Henry Caldwell's cosy little dinners were perfection, and Page and I were anticipating a delightful evening.

"Don Ricardo isn't well enough to come to-night," said Henry.

He and David and I were walking slowly up the zig-zag path. "He's quite sick, in fact. Almost dangerously so, his clerk told me this afternoon."

I was very sorry. Don Ricardo was a civil engineer, at that time engaged in some way on the Valparaiso and Santiago railroad. He was most agreeable company, speaking English perfectly, and appreciating fully, which is one of the hardest things that a foreigner can do, all the points of a joke in our language. I was sorry we should'nt see him, and very sorry to hear of his illness.

Dinner went off very well. Mrs. Caldwell always handled her table and her guests in the most pleasantly efficient manner possible. Every one was naturally a little subdued at first by the Don's absence and its cause, but as the wine went round we grew more like ourselves; and when our coffee had been poured and our cigars lighted, and Peta, the pretty table-girl, had made everything about the table snug and comfortable for a long sitting, we talked of