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30, 1863.] that among those in the employ of the company, and under my own immediate supervision, there was but one to whom I took a fancy. The others were, for the most part, honest fellows enough, but young Arthur Lake was the only member of the staff who had an idea of anything beyond the petty details of our profession. A smart lad, too, and well-grounded in the technical knowledge requisite for an engineer, but there were those who thought him too young for the post he held, and growled at the partiality of the directors. Young Lake was somehow connected with the Cooper family, and, as I told you, Mr. Cooper was our resident manager, though he lived in the city of Mexico, only visiting the mine at intervals.

“At the risk of tiring your patience, Tom, I must try and give you an idea of our life at Cerro Azul. Imagine a big, round-shouldered mountain, looking bluff and clumsy among the sharp serrated peaks that ran away to North and South in an irregular line. The hill that looked so blue through the distant haze turned out, when you got a closer view, to be of all sorts of blended colours, gray, and green, and red, and brown, like a dull tartan, only that the hues lay rather in stripes than chequers, after the fashion of serpentine rocks. There were a few large trees, and here and there a dense thicket of wild agave, cactus, and all manner of thorny shrubs and plants, but most of the mountain was bare, and the sides of it were seamed by ghastly ravines, which were spanned by those swinging bridges of twisted creepers and raw hide, peculiar to Spanish America. As for our settlement, there were two decent houses; they had been begun in stone, but the builder had changed his mind, or lost his workmen, and they had been coarsely finished with those sun-dried bricks which the Mexicans call adobés. There were two store-houses and a sort of wooden barrack, all made of jointed framework, sawn and shaped at a saw-mill belonging to two Americans near Chihuahua, and painfully carried up the hill on the backs of Indian porters. Besides these there were nine or ten cottages of adobé brick, roofed with leaves and twigs plastered over with mud, and twice as many huts of boughs, where our peons lived. There was a chapel, with a tin roof that glittered grandly in the sunbeams, as did also the tin roofs of the three timber buildings. And there were the smelting-houses and engine-sheds, of rough stone daubed with mud, that had been erected in the old days of the Spanish domination, when the mine was first opened. There was good water from a sort of natural rocky well that never ran dry, a great boon in those stony sierras. This well was in a kind of grotto, the coolest, darkest nook conceivable, and it was a real pleasure to pass at once from the white glare of the fierce sunshine into that moist, twilight cave, and hear the incessant drip and gurgle of the water as it flowed from the crevices of the rock into the shapeless basin below. Without this supply we could never have held our ground during the summer droughts, when the very pebbles in the beds of the exhausted torrents were glowing with heat, and the grass withered to brown threads, and the game deserted the country.

“As for the human population of the place, it was motley indeed, and it was only at the cost of infinite pains and patience that I could keep harmony amongst so many jarring nationalities. There were the sub-surveyors and inspectors, English, French and American; there were our Cornishmen, sober and steady enough, but full of scorn for the natives, and abhorred as heretics by the latter. Then we had a miscellaneous lot of Mexicans, half-breeds, and Indians, to do the rough work of the mine, to say nothing of an assayer from Germany, and a Pole for overlooker. The Indians I speak of were Manzos, or ‘tame Indians,’ as the whites call them, and were valuable to us, though they required much humouring. Such patient, gentle beasts of burden I never saw; there was no road by which mules could ascend to the pit mouth, and every thing, fuel, provisions, stores, silver, had to be carried up on men’s backs. When we received the steam-engines and machinery, there was a tough job of it to get them over the ravines, for of course the picturesque swinging-bridges could not bear the weight. But we did it, somehow, with cranes and guys and windlasses, after endless trials and trouble, while with ordinary packages our peons would come toiling, unmurmuringly, up the steep paths, like a line of laden ants.

“But with all their industry, they were ignorant and awkward, and their superstition was a sore stumbling-block to us. It was on their account that the company had built the chapel, and paid a salary to the priest, an oily, scowling Friar Tuck, from a monastery in the plains. That might be all very well, but there was no end to the red-letter days in their calendar; feasts, fasts, vigils, and eves were continually recurring, and the burden of the song was—no work. Besides, they had extraordinary notions of their own, and when, one day, we found a couple of Aztec skeletons, swathed in cottons like a ruder sort of Egyptian mummies, in turning up the ground, the peons went off like scared birds, and would not return for a week. We were obliged to bribe the priest, who bore us no good will, to sprinkle the place with holy water, before we could get our copper-coloured legion to lift pick or shovel in our cause. The priest, I often suspected, thwarted us as much as he dared. He was a half-taught man, dull and vicious, like most Mexican monks, and could hardly read the dog-Latin of his well-thumbed breviary, but he hated us cordially as foreigners and schismatics. As for the poor peons, he ruled them with a rod of iron, screwing fees out of them on every possible pretext, as of a wedding, christening, or burial, and they were all deep in his debt, and virtual slaves, as commonly happens in Mexico. Did I say that the Indians had brought their wives and children to the settlement? Such was the case, and the brown, soft-eyed women, with their lank black hair and high cheekbones, were always to be heard singing some plaintively monotonous ditty at the doors of the huts, as they kneaded the tortillas for the evening meal, and the children rolled in the dust around.

“The other workmen, the whites and half-breeds, though more intelligent, and fitter to be employed