of the tropics, but my attention was
attracted to a little plantation of damask roses blooming profusely. They
were scentless; the climate which supplies the orange blossom with intense
odors exhausts the fragrance of the rose. At nightfall--the night falls
suddenly in this latitude--we were again at our hotel.

We passed our Sunday on a sugar estate at the hospitable mansion of a
planter from the United States about fifteen miles from Matanzas. The
house stands on an eminence, once embowered in trees which the hurricanes
have leveled, overlooking a broad valley, where palms were scattered in
every direction; for the estate had formerly been a coffee plantation. In
the huge buildings containing the machinery and other apparatus for making
sugar, which stood at the foot of the eminence, the power of steam, which
had been toiling all the week, was now at rest. As the hour of sunset
approached, a smoke was seen rising from its chimney, presently pufis of
vapor issued from the engine, its motion began to be heard, and the
negroes, men and women, were summoned to begin the work of the week. Some
feed the fire under the boiler with coal; others were seen rushing to the
mill with their arms full of the stalks of the cane, freshly cut, which
they took from a huge pile near the building; others lighted fires under a
row of huge cauldrons, with the dry stalks of cane from which the juice
had been crushed by the mill. It was a spectacle of activity such as I had
not seen in Cuba.

The sound of the engine was heard all night, for the work of grinding the
cane, once begun, proceeds day and night, with the exception of Sundays
and some other holidays. I was early next morning at the mill. A current
of cane juice was flowing from the mill in a long trunk to a vat in which
it was clarified with lime; it was then made to pass successively from one
seething cauldron to another, as it obtained a thicker consistence by
boiling. The negroes, with huge ladles turning on pivots, swept it from
cauldron to cauldron, and finally passed it into a trunk, which conveyed
it to shallow tanks in another apartment, where it cooled into sugar. From
these another set of workmen scooped it up in moist masses, carried it in
buckets up a low flight of stairs, and poured it into rows of hogsheads
pierced with holes at the bottom. These are placed over a large tank, into
which the moisture dripping from the hogsheads is collected and forms
molasses.

This