ne story high. The tops are
flat and many of them are almost covered with chicken coops. They say
that many a rooster is hatched, grows up to old age and enters the
ministry without ever having set foot upon the ground.

The small plaza in front of the cathedral is really beautiful and there
are some good substantial buildings around it. The large depot is a
modern, well built stately building. The streets are narrow and the shop
doors are open to the street. The doors of these shops are corrugated
iron and are raised up like the cover of a roll-top desk. Above the
shops are the residences of the more well-to-do class. Little balconies
are built out over the sidewalk and here the "idle rich" ladies sit and
watch the crowds below.

To me a very interesting place was a building that used to be a sort of
a place of refuge something like the cities of refuge we read about in
the Bible. In the wide door, so they say, there used to be a chain
stretched across and any man who could reach this was safe regardless of
the crime he had committed. No officers or law could touch him. Of
course, he was in the power of the keepers of the refuge. They could
enslave him for life or kill him and no law could touch them. At least
this is the story told me by a resident of the city.

But the briefest article about Peru should not leave out at least a
mention of the wonderful mountain railways of the country. The Central
Peruvian railway tracks reach the dizzy height of 15,865 feet above sea
level, which is almost a mile higher than the famous Marshall Pass in
the Rockies. This railroad too is a standard gauge. To reach this
altitude the train passes over forty-one bridges, one of which is two
hundred and fifty feet high. It passes through sixty tunnels, the
highest one of which is the Galeria tunnel, which is 15,665 feet above
the sea.

This railroad, perhaps the most wonderful ever constructed, was built by
Henry Meiggs, an American contractor from New York. Some eight thousand
men were employed in the construction and in some places in order to
gain a foothold to begin their work they had to be swung down from
dizzy heights above and held while they cut a safe place in the rocks.

As might be expected many men were killed during the building of this
railway. Once a runaway engine crashed into a derrick car on the top of
a bridge and the debris can be seen in the valley below to this day.
Several Americans lost their lives in this on