ply the natives with rice for seed and food.

There is no grass grown except a sort of swamp grass. The rice cut
when it is green is used in the place of grass. It is never dried,
as it grows the year round. One can look out any day and see rows
of small bundles of this rice paddy laid by the road side for sale
or carried by the natives on bamboo poles, a bundle before and one
behind to balance. It was astonishing to see these small men and
boys struggling under the weight of their "loads of hay." None of the
American horses cared for it; their hay and grain had to be stacked
up along the wharf and guarded. It would be of little use, however,
to the natives as they know nothing about the use of our products.

If there was any wheat grown in the islands, we never heard of it,
and judging from the way in which flour was sold in their markets
at ten cents for a small cornucopia that would hold about a gill,
it was probably brought from either Australia or America.

They have a camote, something like a sweet potato. Although
it is watery and stringy it does very well and is called a good
vegetable. They raise inferior tomatoes and very inferior garlic. It
was a matter of great curiosity to the natives to see an American
plow that was placed on exhibition at the British store. I am sure
when they can take some of our good agricultural implements and turn
the rich soil over and work it, even in a poor way, the results will
be beyond anything we could produce here in the United States.

Their cane sugar is of fine quality, almost equal to our maple
sugar. They plant the seed in a careless way and tend it in the most
slovenly manner imaginable, and yet, they get immense crops. One man,
who put in a crop near where some soldiers were encamped in order to
have their protection, told us that he sold the product from this
small stretch of ground of not more than five or six acres for ten
thousand dollars.

The natives so disliked to work that nearly every one who employed
men kept for them a gaming table and the inevitable fighting cocks;
as long as they can earn a little money to gamble that is all they
care for; houses, lands, and families are not considered. Nearly all
the sugar mills had been burned in our neighborhood, but I know from
the way they do everything else that they must have used the very
crudest kind of boiling apparatus. The sugar seemed reasonably clean
to look at, but when boiled the sediment was anything b