cave was nothing to this, nothing at all!"

"Aladdin, did my Lord say?" murmured the Indian, looking enquiringly at
Harry. "I do not seem to remember him. Surely he was not a Peruvian?
The name does not--"

"No," answered Harry with a laugh. "Aladdin knew nothing of Peru; he
was an Eastern--a Chinese fellow, or something like that, if I remember
rightly."

"Ah, yes!" remarked Huatama reflectively; "I have seen a few Chinese,
down at Lima and Callao, when I had occasion to go there a year ago on
business for the Council of Seven. I do not like them; and I hope that
when my Lord has subjugated the country he will drive them all out of
it."

"Well, we shall see," rejoined Escombe with a laugh. "But it is early
days as yet to talk of driving out the Chinese; there is a great deal to
be done before we shall find ourselves face to face with that question.
And now, what does your last chest contain?"

It contained emeralds, and was more than half-full of stones of
surpassing size and purity of colour, every one of them being a picked
stone especially selected for its exceptional quality. But Escombe's
powers of admiration were by this time completely exhausted, and after
having rather perfunctorily examined and expressed his approval of a few
of the finest specimens, and commended the treasure as a whole to the
unflagging care of Huatama, he returned to his apartments in the palace
and flung himself into a chair to endeavour to convince himself that
what he had seen in those rock-hewn chambers below was all prosaically
real and not the fantasy of a disordered imagination.

As he pictured to himself the great chambers with their heaped-up stacks
of silver and gold bars, and the smaller room with its six coffers of
uncut gems, his thoughts insensibly floated away across the ocean to the
modest little Sydenham home, and he tried to imagine the raptures of his
mother and sister, could they but behold the incredible accumulation of
priceless gems that his eyes had rested upon that day. Then he
remembered that in consequence of this extraordinary adventure of his a
mail boat had been permitted to leave for England with no letter on
board from him to his mother, and he began to wonder anxiously what
would happen at The Limes when its occupants fully realised that the
Peruvian mail had arrived, and that there was no letter for them. It
was the first time that such a thing had ever been permitted to occur;
and, although