THE NYKJOBING SUGAR FACTORY 129 



from tank to tank. Ultimately it emerges as crude 

 sugar into a long room where the heat is so tre- 

 mendous that the men who work there are naked 

 save for a waistcloth. These men are paid from 

 8 to 9 kroner (say nearly 9s. to 10s.) a day, which 

 certainly is not too much considering the trying nature 

 of their task. I believe that baths are provided in 

 which they can cool themselves from time to time, and 

 strange to say, as I was informed, they do not often 

 suffer in their health. 



Below this place is a hall where are vessels of 

 treacle that is extracted from the sugar, which treacle 

 is sold to make brandy and cattle food ; and on the 

 other side of it more iron vessels that are filled with 

 brownish sugar, which is ladled out of certain centri- 

 fugal machines. In a corner of this place, sheltered 

 by a kind of glass house, sit clerks whose business it 

 is to record the weight of the sugar on behalf of the 

 Government, that charges an excise duty of 4 ore (id.) 

 per kilo. Thence the sugar is carried to sieves that 

 shake it smooth and fine, and leaving the sieves it is 

 ultimately conveyed to a top floor, where it lies in an 

 enormous pile. It takes a month's produce of the 

 factory to fill this floor. In the Nykjobing mill the 

 sugar is not refined or converted into loaf. These 

 processes are carried out elsewhere. 



In the lower parts of the building are a great 

 boiler-house with many boilers, and a gigantic pump 

 which sucks out the mud that results from the washing 

 of the beet. It used to be a problem here to know what 

 to do with this mud, but Danish ingenuity was equal 

 to its solution. It is delivered into a flume and flows 

 by gravitation to a stretch of useless swamp-land that 

 lies at a distance of about two miles from the factory, 



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