it free for the first seven years, and pays but twenty-five thousand dollars per year rental for the property during the remainder of the term. In other words, Mr. Grace gets a property which cost twenty-seven million six hundred thousand dollars, eighty-six miles of railroad already equipped and in operation, fifty miles of the most expensive tunnelling and grading in the world for nothing, provided he will complete the line. And more than this, he gets the Cerro del Pasco silver mines, which were worked for centuries by the Jesuits, and have yielded hundreds of millions of dollars even under the primitive system of working which was applied to them by the monks and the native Indians. They were discovered by a native, who while watching sheep on the hills was overtaken by night. He piled together a few stones, under the lee of which he built a fire. In the morning he noticed that the heat had split some of the stones, and he was attracted by something shining from what had been the interior of one of them. He picked up the stone, and took it home to show to his friends. The bright substance was found to be silver, and the great mines of the Cerro del Pasco were discovered. From 1630 to 1824 the mines of the Cerro del Pasco are said to have produced nearly twenty-seven thousand two hundred tons of pure silver. The ore is not in fissure veins, but in an enormous mass, similar to the carbonates of Leadville, and yields from forty to one hundred dollars per ton. It is worked at a cost of three dollars per ton. Even the tailings, which the priests and Indians have left during the two and a half centuries they have been digging away in their rude manner, can be shipped to New York at a profit, and they amount to millions of tons, with silver enough in them, it is estimated, to pay the cost of constructing the road, and to afford it a business that will pay the expense of operating. [Illustration: AN INCA REMINISCENCE.]