mine, from hair to shoes. He has only two garments—a short linen jacket, and a pair of trowsers without pockets. These are carefully shaken. His hat and slippers are pulled off, and equally searched.
The ore does not look very lustrous, but yields about one hundred dollars to the tun. It is crushed, then washed in circular troughs by mules, then trodden out, as at Regla, with chemicals, then baked, then shipped to Mexico, where it goes through a half-dozen bakings and brewings and rollings and stampings before it gets into your pocket for a moment. The other minerals, zinc, copper, antimony, etc., give it more or less difficulty of reduction, but in a country where transportation is cheaper, and the markets nearer, would themselves be preserved, and made to pay in their own value the cost of reducing the richer minerals.
But few of the mines are valuable, and though from three to four millions is the annual product, there are no dividends. The Real del Monte mines proper have not paid expenses within two hundred thousand dollars a year for the past ten years. Those of Pachuca do better, but do not do much. Many mines are worked at a loss. Much expense is necessary for drawing off the water. Miles and miles of "adits" run under the mountain. So that the vast receipts are swallowed up in the vaster expenditures. Yet they expect the costly works will be paid for, and then we will all be changed from mule-driving Pedros to Counts of Regla. If it were not for hope, the heart would break, and silver-mining companies also. They do in spite of hope, as more than one poor minister has found, from Massachusetts to Minnesota.
The conductor says, "Do not invest your money in silver mines. A share or two, if you can lose it, may be well enough; but it is a less certain crop than wheat." He is a good man to follow. Yet one success carries a thousand failures, and a millionaire a century ago will make beggars of all the generations following, as they attempt to discover what he discovered without any attempt. Motto for silver mines: "Be content with what stock you have."
Our ride to Pachuca was for veins of ecclesiastical silver, richer
