brown complexion, high cheekbones, regular features, and straight black hair. These are "Manilla men"-natives of the Philippine Islands. The curiously mixed population of lower Louisiana includes two or three thousand of them.

Big stout carts with broadtired wheels haul the resurrected canes to the field prepared for planting. Here a gang of women called "droppers" take up the canes by armfuls and drop them in heaps at intervals beside the furrows. They are placed in the furrows by other women called "planters." Another gang passes along the furrows and chops up the canes with rude hatchet-like knives. The object of this is to give the weak eyes a chance to draw strength from the stalk which would otherwise be absorbed by those which have already a good start. About six tons of cane go to the planting of an acre. One acre of seedcane will plant three acres, and as the planting must be done every third year, one-ninth of the crop average of a plantation must be given up to seedcane. When the seed-cane is cut in the fall, the stalks are laid between the rows of stubble and covered with a plow run on each side.

After the canes are laid and cut, they are covered with plows or with a machine called a rotary hoe, and the ground is then rolled to press the dirt close to the sprouting eyes. The first crop is called plant-cane. Next year the cane sprouts from the stubble, and is called first ratoons. The second year it sprouts again, and is called second ratoons. The third year the stubble is plowed up and the ground sowed with field peas, which recuperates the land, as clover does Northern farms. The fourth year it is again put in plant-cane. A good yield to the acre is 25 tons of plant-cane, 20 of first ratoons, and 15 of second ratoons. On the Upper Coast, above New Orleans, it is customary to let the stubble ratoon but once. In Cuba it often ratoons six successive years, but the cane becomes constantly more woody and poorer in saccharine matter.

In the stubble-fields the first spring, work consists in "barring off," or moving the dirt away from the roots of the cane with plows and hoes, to permit the light and air to hasten

the germinating of the ratoons. By the middle of April there should be a good "stand" of the young sprouts. Then the dirt is worked back toward the rows, and there is constant cultivation with the plow till about the 1st of July, when the crop is "laid by." No more work is done on it till the cutting begins in September. Now the cane is so high that a man driving a mule is lost to sight between the rows. Soon it will be tall enough to swallow up a man on horseback. The rows are usually seven feet apart and always run parallel with the ditches - that is, from the river or bayou toward the swamp. July and August was formerly the time for cutting wood in the swamps to run the sugar-mill during the grinding season, but now most plantations burn coal. The crop being "made," the planter feels that he can relax his vigilance, and if he has the means, he goes off to the North with his family to escape the two hottest months of the year in Louisiana and build up his health in a less enervating climate.

The field hands work steadily, but in a rather leisurely way. I am struck by the strong mus

cular build of many of the men and women and the easy, cheerful way in which they go about their tasks. The women only do field work during the planting and grinding seasons. The rest of the time they look after their simple household duties. There is a good deal of light work on a plantation for the children, so that they become helps to their parents as soon as they are eight or ten years old. The ordinary wage of a man is 75 cents per day, and of a woman 65. But during the cutting and grinding period, which embraces three months of a year, the men earn $1 to $1.25 for regular hours and usually make extra pay by overwork. In no part of the South do the negroes seem to be as well off as on the sugar plantations: there is a common saying that it takes fourteen months' work in a year to make a sugar crop. An industrious man can actually earn fourteen months' wages between the 1st of January and the 31st of December. Each family gets a house and a garden-patch rent free, and on many plantations is allowed to keep chickens and pigs. Their fuel is cut in the swamp or picked up from the abundant driftwood cast ashore by the river. The climate is so warm that not much money need be spent for clothes. A thrifty negro family will always manage, however, to have presentable garments for Sunday wear, and the women can usually gratify their love for bright ribbons and cheap flashy jewelry.

We ride back in the rear of the plantation to see the huge drainage-wheel driven by steam, lazily lifting the yellow water from the canal on its broad arms up to the level of the bayou that leads to the swamp. We pass a group of houses inhabited by Spaniards, where moss is drying on the palings and yellow-faced children. are tumbling about the dooryards,-"Built for tenant farmers who worked ground on shares," explained the planter, pointing to the cottages, "but the system did not succeed. The tenants were not willing to share the hardships of a bad

year, and when they got less money by reason of a short crop, they accused me of cheating them. I now let the cottages to white laborers employed for wages on the place."

"Is there much white labor seeking employment on sugar estates?"

"More and more every year-principally Germans and Italians. Thrifty people they

are too; very poor when they come from the old country, but soon getting ahead."

Now the tones of the big plantation-bell are heard across the broad, level fields. All the gangs stop work, and people and animals go trooping to the quarters for dinner, the foreman of each gang going ahead to prevent the men from racing the mules. As we ride homewards, the planter talks of the great part religion plays in the lives of the negroes, and of the survival of old heathen superstitions. Some time ago the negroes took a dislike to the overseer, and sent to the city for a conjurer to come down and "Voodoo" him. The conjurer undertook to rid them of the overseer for $30, but finally came down in his demand to $2.50. An investigation showed

that the only thing he did was to place at night on the doorstep of the overseer's house some white powder with two black hairs crossed upon it. The negroes questioned would not say whether they expected the overseer to die, or only to leave the place. The Voodoo man had merely told them that they would "get shut of him."

Our next visit was to Magnolia plantation, the sugar estate farthest down the river of

any now worked. Below it all the cultivated land is in small rice-farms.

The Magnolia sugar-house is generally known in Louisiana as having the best machinery and all the new processes. It is not much imitated, for two reasons: First, the conservatism of the older class of planters, which leads them to stick to the methods they understand, and second, the fact that the business of sugar-making has not been sufficiently prontable in recent years to enable planters of moderate capital to purchase new apparatus. They are obliged to hold on to their old pans and kettles, for want of money to buy new. Let us now go into the great irregular brick building, with its three tower-like chimneys and its general big-factory air, which contains the sugar making plant, promising at the start to go through hastily, and not to bore the reader with details about machinery, or with the fine scientific points of the business. A sugar-planter will talk to you by the hour, about percentages of sucrose, and glucose, inverted crystallization, degrees of vacuum, and polariscope tests, until your brain takes in only a confusion of words and figures. First the owner of "Magnolia" calls attention to his bagasse-burner, which makes more than half the steam used to run the mill. Formerly the bagasse, which is the cane after it has parted with as much of its juice as the mill will extract, was either burned in a furnace to get rid of it, or thrown out on the levee to help fight off the river from eating away the bank. Now every economically managed mill burns it to make steam, by the aid of the draught of an enormous chimney. The best method

is to burn it on grates, under which air is forced by a blower.

The canes, hauled in the big carts from the fields, are dumped upon an endless band and carried into the mill, usually direct to the big iron rollers, but at Magnolia first to a "shredder." There are only two shredders in the State, the machine being a new invention. Its revolving teeth chew up the cane into pulp. The pulp and juice fall upon a rubber apron which carries them to the mill; grinding is simply squeezing between three or four sets of iron rollers. Now the juice runs in a trough to a strainer, where a woman gathers up now and then the shreds of cane remaining and takes them back to the mill. Next the juice is pumped into an iron cylinder called the "juice-heater," and heated with exhaust steam to 190°. This is a new process, not much in use. Next it runs into the clarifiers or defecators, which are large iron vats with rows of steam pipes at the bottom. Here slacked quicklime is added, which brings to the top all impurities, to be skimmed off into a division of the pan at the end. The juice is then boiled and "brushed" with a long paddle until the bubbles become white, when it is allowed to settle for fifteen minutes. There is a side operation for saving the sugar in the skimmings by putting them through filter presses.

In the advanced process at Magnolia the juice next goes through bone-black filters instead of to the ordinary settling-tanks, to settle for six or seven hours. A filter is a big iron drum containing ten thousand pounds of animal bone black. The "char" must be washed with

hot water every two days and dried in a kiln. After filtering, the juice, still thin as when first pressed from the cane, goes to the "double effects." This is a new apparatus, resembling two upright boilers of a portable engine. Each cupola-like machine contains five hundred tubes in which the juice is boiled in a vacuum by exhaust steam. The usual plan is to boil in an open cylindrical pan, having coils of steam pipe at the bottom. Now the juice goes to fresh filters and next to the vacuum-pan, which is not a pan, but a big iron cupola-shaped cylinder, with an apparatus for exhausting

iron pan in which steel arms revolve. Next the "masse cuite" falls into the "centrifugals," which are small drums holding about 120 pounds of sugar. Within the drum is a wire screen basket revolving at the rate of 1600 turns per minute. The centrifugal force throws out the molasses through the wire network and leaves the sugar. Perfectly clear water is then spurted into the drum from a syringe. This water is thrown out through the sugar, washing out the remaining coloring matter. The motion of the centrifugal is now stopped and the sugar let out of a trap in the bottom

the air and multitudinous coils of steam pipe. This is the process requiring most skill. The chief sugar-maker attends to it himself, watching his vacuum-gauge and thermometer carefully, and testing every few minutes his boiling mass by drawing out a tube which does not break the vacuum. He seeks to keep the temperature down to 130°. If it is too high some of the sucrose will "invert" or "caramel" into glucose, and the proportion of sugar will be lessened. First, he fills the pan only in part. Then when he sees fine granulations of sugar against the light in his test-tube, he admits more juice, and thus builds up the grains little by little to larger size. When sufficiently boiled, the thick syrup is called the "masse cuite." The "strike" is now done, air is admitted to the pan, and the contents are run off into the "mixer,"- a huge oblong

into a screw conveyer, from which a bucket band carries it to a big bin. A man stands in the bin and shovels the sugar, as if it were wheat, into a tube under which the barrels are placed one by one to receive it.

This first product of the sugar-mill is called "firsts," and is the whitest and best sugar. The molasses is boiled again in the vacuumpan, goes again through the centrifugals, and a light-brown sugar called "seconds" results. Yet again the remaining molasses goes through the pans, but the "masse cuite" is now sticky and stringy, and will not yield its sugar to the centrifugals. It is put into iron tanks on wheels, called "wagons," each of which holds about 2500 pounds, and wheeled into the hotroom. The temperature here is from 90° to 100o. Here the wagons stand in closely packed rows for thirty days. The mass is now

very stiff and waxy. It is next thrown into the boiler, stirred up well and put into the centrifugals, with cold water, which washes out the molasses. The final remainder of sugar is called" thirds," and is of a darkbrown color. The separated molasses is of a very poor quality, and sells for only about thirteen cents a gallon. Distillers use it to make alcohol, and the glucose manufacturers buy it to give a cane-flavor to their glucose syrup.

By the improved processes I have thus described about 78 per cent. of the weight of the cane is extracted in juice, whereas the average extraction in Louisiana is only about 63 per cent. The best five roller-mills get about 70 per cent., the additional 8 per cent. being due to the use of the shredder. The new processes give about 160 pounds of sugar from a ton of cane, the average of the State being only 100 pounds. In 1885 Magnolia plantation averaged 163 pounds from a ton of cane. The sucrose of the crop of 1885 was about II per cent. less than that of 1884, but the sugar yield was increased 6 pounds to the ton of cane by improved manufacture. To some extent the low amount of sugar produced by old methods is compensated for by the greater amount and better quality of the molasses, but as molasses is worth only 2 cents a pound, when sugar brings from 42 to 6, there is no possible economy in holding on to the old processes.

A SUGAR plantation is divided by main ditches and roads into sections known in some parishes as "cuts," in others as "strips," and in still others as "blocks." These have names familiar to all the people on the place. At Magnolia they talk of the" Polly Garden Strip," the "Molly Shanty Strip," the "North Front Strip," the Big Oak Strip," etc. Each of these sections is subdivided by small ditches into fields containing an average of about twentyfive acres. Every well-managed plantation is carefully mapped, and the planter, running his eye over the map in his office, will tell you just what fields are in plant-cane, in stubble-cane, or in cow-peas. He plans his operations on his map as a general does a campaign. It is a stirring, fascinating business, which keeps a man on the alert, mentally and physically, and develops the most intelligent type of the country gentleman to be found in the South.

WASH-DAY IN THE QUARTERS.

The cane-cutting season begins the 1st of October. It would be advantageous to wait longer, for the canes are constantly sweetening their juices, but there is danger that the crop may not all be harvested before the frosts come. In Cuba, where there is no frost, the planter can continue to cut and grind until the new sap begins to flow in the stalks. Not infrequently it happens that a Louisiana planter raises more cane than he can work up in his mill before the cold weather of January sets in. The next year he reduces his acreage. The amount of land he can cultivate must depend on the capacity of his mill.

A great deal of sugar is still made in Louisiana by the old open-kettle process, wasteful as it is, for the simple reason that the planters cannot afford to buy new apparatus. This old process is substantially the same as was in use at the beginning of the century. Five or six big cast-iron kettles of graduated size are arranged in line over a brick furnace. At one end is the fire of cypress wood; at the other the tall chimney. The cane-juice runs into