While all hearts are linked in a chain of love, The Sovereign ceased. A scene of wild delight About their queen rare floral sweets whose blooms As yet the dwellers in this mystic sphere And Kaspar woke As on his face, through the church windows, broke THE Arequipa in Lower Peru, between the sixteenth and eighteenth degrees of latitude, would present a most desolate uniformity of aridity but for certain fertile valleys which break the dreary monotony of the lomas, or barren ridges, that line the shore of the Pacific for three hundred and twenty miles. The fairest and most tropical of these valleys is that of Tambo, which begins at Mollendo beach and extends for fifteen leagues up to the heights of Puquina on the slope of the Western Andes. It is enclosed narrowly between a double chain of rocky hills, and rises gradually from the ocean-level to an eleva tion of six thousand seven hundred and fifty feet. The Tambo River flows through it and empties into the Pacific. It was from this lovely valley of Tambo that, toward the end of a certain October, Paul Marcoy, the French traveller in Peru, to whom the world owes much of its later knowledge of that country, started on a long journey across the sierra region to explore the Rio Apurimac from its source, in Lake Vilafro, at the base of the eastern slope of the Andes, to its junction with the Rio Aquillabamba or Urubamba a journey which led him across the sierra and up the valley of Huarancalqui to Cerro Melchior, in the Great Pajonal. in the northern part of the province. This person, Pierre Leroux by name, needs an introduction to the reader, for he was destined to become Marcoy's travelling companion in his excursion, and to share with him in his experiences, pleasant and otherwise, up to the summit of Cerro Melchior. He was a native of Besançon, and had PIERRE LEROUX. been living in Peru for fifteen years, during which time he had acquired and lost two fortunes in mining operations. As Marcoy has sketched him, with pen and pencil, we are shown a man of forty-five years of age, tall, with a countenance at once frank and intelligent, robust in health, sinewy of limb, and with the iron will of one who, having marked out a goal, seeks it unmindful of obstacles. He had given to his plantation the name of Tambochico, or 'Little Tambo.' Leroux's mind at the moment of Marcoy's appearance in the valley was absorbed in a project of introducing on his hacienda the use of certain machinery for cleaning his rice and cotton. He had ordered it a year before, at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, from New York, through the British consulat Islay, a port about fifteen miles higher up the coast, and was now impatiently expecting its arrival, together with that of the ready-made pine-wood sheds intended to house the machines. Once a week he went to Islay to make inquiries, leaving Tam at Ayacucho in the Peruvian war of independence. The next was owned by an Englishman; and the third, a rice, cotton and sugar plantation, was the property of a friend of Marcoy, whose acquaintance he had made five years before, at a place called Caraveli, 36 The particular aroused his interest, and he From his friends of the olivares, our traveller would stroll a few hundred yards higher up the valley to chat with his acquaintances of the highuerales. The male adult owners of the fig plantations were generally absent, as they preferred to abandon the conjugal roof and hire themselves out as labourers to the large planters of the valley, some of them returning each night and others only at the end of the week. The women of the family meanwhile attended to the gathering of the figs and their preparation, in a dried state, for the markets of the sierra towns, or engaged in the manufacture of a sort of violet-coloured wine, made from the figs, which the people call chimbango. This fig wine is sweet and agreeable to the taste, and of moderately intoxicating powers, and is sold at a cuartillo (about three cents) a quart. Still higher up the valley, this cultivated zone was succeeded by a sandy tract, irregularly interspersed with low ridges of the kind which, under |