grinding season the machinery is run night and day,
but is obliged to lie idle for eight months out of the year.

In the uncultivated fields through which we passed when driving out to
the sugar estate, the prickly pear grew close to the ground in great
luxuriance, as it is seen on our Western prairies. Its thick leaves,
so green as to be dense with color, impart the effect of greensward at
a short distance. On close inspection it was seen to be the star
cactus, which like the Northern thistle kills all other vegetation
within its reach. Here and there the wild ipecacuanha with its bright
red blossom was observed, but the fields, except those devoted to the
cane, were very barren near Cienfuegos.

Sugar-cane is cultivated like Indian corn, which it also resembles in
appearance. It is first planted in rows, not in hills, and must be
hoed and weeded until it gets high enough to shade its roots. Then it
may be left to itself until it reaches maturity. This refers to the
first laying out of a plantation, which will afterwards continue
fruitful for years by very simple processes of renewal. When
thoroughly ripe the cane is of a light golden yellow, streaked here
and there with red. The top is dark green, with long narrow leaves
depending,--very much like those of the corn stalk,--from the centre
of which shoots upwards a silvery stem a couple of feet in height, and
from its tip grows a white fringed plume, of a delicate lilac hue. The
effect of a large field at its maturity, lying under a torrid sun and
gently yielding to the breeze, is very fine, a picture to live in the
memory ever after. In the competition between the products of
beet-root sugar and that from sugar-cane, the former controls the
market, because it can be produced at a cheaper rate, besides which
its production is stimulated by nearly all of the European states
through the means of liberal subsidies both to the farmer and to the
manufacturer. Beet sugar, however, does not possess so high a
percentage of true saccharine matter as does the product of the cane,
the latter seeming to be nature's most direct mode of supplying us
with the article. The Cuban planters have one advantage over all other
sugar-cane producing countries, in the great and inexhaustible
fertility of the soil of the island. For instance: one to two
hogsheads of sugar to the acre is considered a good yield in Jamaica,
but in Cuba three hogsheads is the average. Fertilizing of any sort is