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304 which contained among other things a dynamite cartridge big enough to blow the whole tool-house into the air. I did not regard myself as naturally timorous or nervous, but when the convict shut down the lid of that box over the long glowing wick of a tallow candle and a dynamite cartridge with fuse attached, I had business out-of-doors. When I thought time enough had elapsed for the wick to go out, I reëntered the house, washed my muddy hands in the grindstone trough, inspected Mr. Frost's sketches, and asked Mr. Nésterof a long series of questions about the mines.

The silver-bearing veins or lodes in the mines of Algachí and Pokrófski vary in thickness from 12 or 14 inches to 5 or 6 feet. The ore, which has a bright glittering appearance, consists of silver and lead in the proportion of about 1 to 100, with a greater or less admixture of what the Russian miners call zínkovi obmánka, or "zinc deceit." As the metal last named is much less fusible than lead, it becomes very troublesome in the reducing furnaces, and, so far as possible, the miners get rid of it by breaking up the ore into small pieces and discarding that part of it in which the zinc predominates. The work of crushing and sorting is performed by the weaker male convicts and the women, and is regarded as the lightest form of hard labor. It is about equivalent to breaking stones on the road with a heavy, short-handled hammer. Out of the mines of Algachí and Pokrófski, which are the most productive in the district, there are taken every year nearly 400 short tons of ore, which, when reduced, yields about 1440 pounds of silver, valued at $20,000, and 144,000 pounds of lead. The lead, owing to the expense of transportation to a market, is virtually worthless, and at the time of our visit nearly 2000 tons of it were lying at the Kutomárski Zavód, where the ore from these mines for many years has been reduced. The average number of convicts employed in the two mines is 220, and each of them gets out 3600 pounds of ore a year, or about 10 pounds a day. These figures alone are