Excerpt from Chile Today and Tomorrow

America, one Of the most enchantingly lovely, the most frankly friendly, regions in all the world.

It seems as though nature had deliberately tried to compensate here for the arid and the stormy end of the belt by showering beauty upon the intervening strip. There is none of that Strange illusory quality, the sense Of living in a mirage, that attends upon tropi cal regions. Central Chile is fresh, dewy-bright, with the familiar sweetness of the temperate zones of western Europe. Here are fine cattle, sheep and horses, pleasant orchards of pears and plums and apples; Olive groves and grapevines; the long green lines of wheat fields, the Spires of the poplars, the blackberry hedges edged with gorse and bracken and purple-headed thistles, are all familiar. The Stock of the farms, every kind Of crop except those invaluable American contribu tions to the world's list of foods, maize and potatoes were introduced from overseas, but they have long been absorbed into the economic life of Chile. If the visitor is lulled into forgetfulness Of his real milieu by the sight of neat wooden fences, by the bramble - bor dered and fern-edged lane, he is recalled by the sudden glimpse of a shining white cone suspended in the trans parent air, the snowy head of a far volcano. Or he may see in the thicket beside the road. A trail of copihue with its bright rosy bell, or note that the farmer, ruddy cheeked and bright-eyed, riding a fine horse along a deep muddy road, wears a gay poncho and a pair of enormous silver spurs.

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