Our priest also engaged to supply mines, in the adjacent country, with salt for benefiting or preparing metals, which the Caurimen, with their little broad-backed and hardy nags, are used to convey from Huacho on the coasts of the Pacific, by the vale of Sayan, across the Cordillera. He was withal a watch-maker to the neighbouring villages within many leagues of his residence, and knew, if we forget not, how to put the church organ to rights when out of repair. His people were apparently fond of so stirring and general a speculator; and as they can only grow for themselves, and that in the most sheltered corners, very bad potatoes, with frequent failures in the harvest, (though their common yields good pasture,) their pastor supplied them with maize, (as the miner in isolated localities supplies, at large profits, maize and clothing, &c. to his workmen,) on which, with potatoes, cheese, eggs, and guinea-pigs, they principally support themselves. Butter they rarely know how to churn; and, as the milk is chiefly used for making cheese, it is not often drunk as an article of nutriment, save by those who live in small round booths, that are ever and anon guarded by a host of noisy curs, with hair as shaggy and matted as that which covers the heads of the urchins that feed them. These pastoral huts are scattered over the distant plains and ranges of the mountains throughout the “estancias,” or tracts of hilly pasture-land allotted for rearing and feeding cattle and sheep. At such estancias and huts, the traveller in the interior of Peru has frequently to rest for the night. The poor Indian owner of a few horned cattle, will rather languish with hunger than slaughter one head of his fold for his private consumption; but he who owns a small flock of sheep can more conveniently sustain himself on meat and “caldo,”—mutton tea, (for vegetables are commonly wanting to make that kind of broth which is to be found at the grain-grower’s,) especially when any traveller passes that way, who buys one of his small sheep—much smaller on the hills than in the warm valleys—for use on the road, and employs the Indian himself to butcher it. These inhabitants of the snowy range, or lofty dales of the Andes, we frequently met,—and they are easily known by their warm clothing, capacious chests, and ruddy complexions,—descending from the frigid regions to the temperate and grain valleys, to barter for the vegetable productions of the agriculturist fresh mutton, which, already skinned and free from offal, they carry on donkeys (animals which in the hands of the Indian escape the cruel stripes and goads inflicted on them by the merciless negro or zambo); and this meat, like beef, being previously dried in the sun, is laid up for use by the dweller of the warm and narrow glen overhung by scorched and rocky acclivities, who places it before the traveller, under the usual name of “charque,” of which we have often eaten with a good appetite.