ROUND AND ABOUT A SUGAR REFINERY 85 



the warehouse into a large room, which has a most 

 funereal aspect. It is fitted with long rows of huge, 

 black cylinders ; these are full of animal charcoal, 

 through which soaks the sugar-juice that has already 

 been subjected to the cotton cloth process of filtration. 

 The juice is brown when it enters the char vessels, 

 but white when it leaves them. The white juice is 

 a compound of pure sugar and water. 



Now the sugar has to be solidified and the water 

 evaporated. In other words, the juice has to be con- 

 centrated. The methods adopted are so similar to 

 those which you have already watched in modern 

 factories, such as Diamond and Gunthorpes, that for 

 some time you feel quite at home in the various quarters 

 of the Refinery which you visit. You recognize the 

 vacuum pans, and know that within them sugar 

 crystals are incubating ; you can sympathize with the 

 anxiety of the pan-boiler as he scrutinizes samples 

 of the boiling on a piece of glass, for you realize that 

 with him rests the responsibility of deciding when 

 the masse- cuite is ready to leave the pans. 



But you are not prepared for the next operation. 

 You expected to see the masse- cuite dropped into a 

 big trough, and thence run off into centrifugals ; 

 whereas here it is expelled into enormous, barrel- 

 shaped moulds. These moulds have a hollow middle, 

 round which there radiate to the sides a number of 

 vertical plates, enclosing narrow, slab-like spaces. 

 The masse-cuite is poured into these spaces, which 

 together contain about ten or eleven hundredweight, 

 and left to cool. Then the moulds are taken by over- 

 head railway to an adjoining room, where each is 

 swung by a crane into a centrifugal ; as the won- 



