On my return from Mexico, I found the road up the Perote covered with wagons laden with portions of a monster steam-engine, the fifth that was to be employed to pump the water from this mine. It seems incredible that so large a sum as $1,000,000 should be required for the freight alone of this new machinery. But, after I had become familiar with the vast scale on which every thing is conducted at a large silver mine, where millions appear as the small dust of the balance, I can credit what my readers might think improbable.
I have often spoken of the peculiarities of peasant life in the country and of the peons of the cities. But there is another phase of humble life to be considered—the social state of the mine laborer. Like all men whose wages are very irregular, and subject to the fluctuations which follow mining speculations, they themselves become irregular in their lives. They have all heard of the many instances of persons of as humble condition as themselves accidentally falling upon a princely fortune, and they know, too, what a miraculous change such a discovery makes in the social condition of a peon, for every miner in Zacatecas knows the homely distich:
"Had the metals not been so rich at San Bernabe,
Ibarra would not have wed the daughter of Virey."
In addition to scraps and snatches of songs, the mining laborers have their romances, which are as wild as the yarns of the sailor, and have for their almost universal theme the miraculous acquisition and loss of a fortune. The hero possesses princely wealth to-day, though yesterday he was suffering for food, and to-morrow he will be again bereft of all by the fickle turns that Fortune makes in the wheel of destiny. The wildest of our romances never come up to many incidents that have occurred in their own mine; and when they attempt fiction, it is on the pattern of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. I do verily believe that all that class of Arabian