It goes without saying that most of the fruits and staple products of the tropics are to be found both at Concepcion and at the port of Talcahuano. Each place we visit seems to have some specialty in this line. Here, it is the watermelon. Favored by the soil and the climate, this fruit is developed to its maximum in weight, richness of flavor, and general perfection. They are sold cheap enough everywhere. A centavo will buy a large ripe one. Street carts and donkeys are laden with them, and so are the decks of all outgoing vessels. It is both food and drink to the poor peons, who consume the fruit in quantities strongly suggestive of cholera, dropsy, or some other dreadful illness. Any one accustomed to travel in our Southern States, in the right season of the year, will have observed how voraciously the negro population, young and old, eat of the cheap, ripe crop of watermelons; but these South American peons have a capacity for storage and digestion of this really wholesome article, beyond all comparison. A child not more than ten years of age will devour the ripe portion of a large melon in a few minutes, and no ill effects seem to follow. An adult eats two at a meal which would weigh, we are afraid to say how much, but they are considerably larger than the average melons which are brought to New England from the South. After all, the watermelon is healthful food, though it is more filling than nourishing. It will be remembered that the famous fasting individual, Dr. Tanner, after eating nothing for forty days and forty nights, took for his first article of nourishment, at the close of this time of fasting, half a watermelon, and that he retained and digested it successfully.
Valparaiso.--Principal South American Port of the Pacific.--A Good Harbor.--Tallest Mountain on this Continent.--The Newspaper Press.--Warlike Aspect.--Girls as Car Conductors.--Chilian Exports.--Foreign Merchants.--Effects of Civil War.--Gambling in Private Houses.--Immigration.--Culture of the Grape.--Agriculture.--Island of Juan Fernandez.