of black men who go out as divers there
whenever a boat is ready to start.'"

To go to the sugar plantation to which our friends were invited, they
had to make a journey inland, in a wagon over a rough road about forty
miles long. The plantation was located on both sides of a small river,
and employed, at the time of their visit, about one hundred and fifty
men. One of the owners was there, and exerted himself to his fullest
ability to make the strangers comfortable and have them see all that was
to be seen. They visited the crushing mills and the boiling rooms, and
learned a great deal about the process of manufacturing sugar from the
sugar cane.

"We may say briefly," said Ned, "that the cane-stalks are crushed
between rollers, and the juice is caught in vats, whence it flows in
troughs or pipes to the evaporating house. Here it is boiled till it is
reduced to syrup, and then it is boiled again, until it is ready for
granulation. Then it is placed in perforated cylinders which revolve
with tremendous rapidity. By means of centrifugal force all the moisture
is expelled and the dry sugar remains behind."

Our friends visited the fields where the luxuriant cane-stalks were
growing, but they were quite as much interested in the men they saw at
work there as in the fields themselves. Harry remarked that the men
seemed to be different from any of the Australian blacks they had yet
seen in their travels.

"These are not Australian blacks at all," said their guide; "they are
foreigners."

"Foreigners! Of what kind?"

"They are South Sea Islanders principally from the Solomon Islands; some
of them are from the New Hebrides and some from the Kingsmill group."

"You import them to work on the plantations, I suppose?"

"Yes; that's the way of it. You see this country is too hot for white
men to work in the field, just as your sugar-growing States in America
are too hot for him to work in. The blacks are the only people that can
stand it, and as for the Australian blacks, they're no good. There are
not enough of them anyway, and even if there were, we couldn't rely upon
them. An Australian black will never stay in one place for any length
of time, as you have doubtless learned already. He is liable to quit at
any moment, and that sort of thing we can't stand on a sugar plantation.
We must have men to work steadily, and the only way we can get them is
by hiring them under contract from some of the Pacific Islands."

"I