FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   >>  
ew Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency. The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   >>  



Top keywords:

hundred

 
ground
 

Jackson

 
scientific
 

thousand

 

plantation

 
Warmouth
 

modern

 

complex

 

elaborate


cultivated

 
fashion
 

intricate

 

troublesome

 

twelve

 

details

 

However

 
attempt
 

expensive

 

methods


forget

 

describe

 

matter

 

achieve

 

centrifugals

 
interesting
 
exceedingly
 

machinery

 
process
 

making


remove
 

filter

 

alcohol

 

clarifying

 
discharge
 

evaporating

 

extract

 

filters

 
fiddlers
 

scampering


sidewise

 
drainage
 

ditches

 

direction

 

levees

 
wilderness
 

disturbing

 
Expensive
 

traction

 

engine