But all this grandeur is gone, and the last traces of it are now to be found in the pawn-shops of Lima, which are full of rare old silver, paintings, china, and lace. The people are so poor that they are compelled to sell their jewels to get bread and meat. The stagnation of business has deprived them of their ordinary incomes from real estate, and the war has taken off the laborers, so that the sugar haciendas and the mills are idle. I met people whose incomes were formerly hundreds of thousands of dollars, from rentals and interest on investments, who are now compelled to patronize the pawn-shops, because their tenants cannot pay rent and their investments no longer produce a profit. The paper-money of the country is as valueless as the Confederate bills were during our civil war. One issue, the Incas, is entirely worthless. The Government tried to enforce its circulation by locking up men who refused to accept it as legal tender; but the merchants marked up the prices of their goods, and charged two thousand dollars a yard for calico, when the Treasury surrendered, and issued another loan which is almost as bad as the first. You give a twenty-dollar bill to your bootblack and two hundred and fifty dollars an hour for a hack. It costs about six hundred dollars a day for board at the hotel, and fifty dollars for a bunch of cigarettes. House-owners who have leased their property for a term of years without specifying in what sort of money the rent shall be paid are compelled to accept this worthless paper at par. I met a lady whose income from rents ten years ago was more than a thousand dollars a week in gold, but now it is only the same amount in paper--scarcely enough to pay the servants--and she is selling her bric-à-brac to live. The haciendas and farms are no longer tilled, because for several years past all the laborers have been pressed into the army; and the sugar plantations are useless, for the machinery by which they were operated was destroyed by the Chilians during the recent war. [Illustration: A PERUVIAN CHAMBER.]