266 CENTRAL CHILE. (CHAP. XIX. 
most profusely, with merely carrying up his own body. ‘With 
this very severe labour, they live entirely on boiled beans and 
bread. They would prefer having bread alone; but their 
masters, finding that they cannot work so hard upon this, treat 
them like horses, and make them eat the beans. Their pay is 
here rather more than at the mines of Jajuel, being from 24 to 
28 shillings per month. They leave the mine only once in three 
weeks; when they stay with their families for two days. One of 
the rules in this mine sounds very harsh, but answers pretty well 
for the master. The only method of stealing gold is to secrete 
pieces of the ore, and take them out as occasion may offer. 
Whenever the major-domo finds a lump thus hidden, its full 
value is stopped out of the wages of all the men; who thus, 
without they all combine, are obliged to keep watch over each 
other. 
When the ore is brought to the mill, it is ground into an im- 
palpable powder; the process of washing removes all the lighter 
particles, and amalgamation finally secures the gold-dust. The 
washing, when described, sounds a very simple process; but it is 
beautiful to see how the exact adaptation of the current of water 
to the specific gravity of the gold, so easily separates the pow- 
dered matrix from the metal. The mud which passes from the 
mills is collected into pools, where it subsides, and every now 
and then is cleared out, and thrown into a common heap. A 
great deal of chemical action then commences, salts of various 
kinds effloresce on the surface, and the mass becomes hard. After 
having been left for a year or two, and then rewashed, it yields 
gold; and this process may be repeated even six or seven times ; 
but the gold each time becomes less in quantity, and the inter- 
vals required (as the inhabitants say, to generate the metal) are 
longer. There can be no doubt that the chemical action, already 
mentioned, each time liberates fresh gold from some combination. 
The discovery of a method to effect this before the first grinding, 
would without doubt raise the valne of gold-ores many fold. It 
is curious to find how the minute particles of gold, being scat- 
tered about and not corroding, at last accumulate in some quan- 
tity. A short time since a few miners, being out of work, ob- 
tained permission to scrape the ground round the house and mill : 
they washed the earth thus got together, and so procured thirty 
