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After this experience, having nothing to live on and no friends, he was obliged to labour with his hands like a peon, and this he did in many ways. He broke horses, he herded cattle; once, even, for two months he sank so low—it makes me angry to write of it—as to be forced to wait upon the guests in an inn at Panama.

Thence he drifted to Nicaragua, and became mixed up in mining ventures, and when first I met him he had been a miner for ten years. Most of this time he spent managing a mine for an American, in the Chontales country, on the frontier of Honduras, where the fever is so bad that few white men can live. Here it was that he learned to speak Spanish and the Indian or Maya tongue. At length, after an attack of fever which nearly killed him, he left Honduras, and came to Mexico, where he accepted the management of this silver mine at Cumarvo. Hitherto it had been worked by a Mexican on behalf of its owners, who dismissed the rogue for stealing the ore and selling it.

This mine, though very rich, was hard to deal with profitably because of the water gathered in it, and all the months that the Señor Strickland had been its captain he was employed in driving a tunnel upwards from a lower level in the cliff, in order to drain the workings. Shortly after I came into his service this tunnel was finished, for now I was able to obtain plenty of labour, which before he had lacked, and we began to bring to bank ore running as high as two hundred ounces to the ton, so that for some months all went well.