1858. 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



275 



to the depth of an inch or two ; place it in the 

 tree and place a small glass globe lamp in the 

 middle of the pan, which permit to burn all night. 

 In darting towards the light, the curculios strike 

 the glass, and are precipitated into the liquid 

 from which they are unable to extricate them 

 selves." 



For the New England Fanner. 

 "KAISING CAJNTE." 



Mr. Editor : — If you are not already weary 

 of the accounts of cane-raising experience, I 

 should be glad to give you the result of my own 

 experiments. You know we read the newspapers 

 here. Well, last winter there came to us from 

 the north, east and south, such glowing descrip- 

 tions of the results of Sorghum-raising that our 

 little village was thrown into quite an excite- 

 ment upon the matter. One gentleman procured 

 a good deal of seed from Washington and dis 

 tributed it, and others sent to Boston and bought 

 it in larger quantities. The price of sugar and 

 molasses were daily on the rise, till we began to 

 fear that pies and cake would be reminiscences, 

 not present realities ; besides, the Yankee spirit 

 of independence was up, and we were ripe for a 

 trial. Now, just as Spring came on, I had a piece 

 of land given to me for cultivation if I wished so 

 to use it. There was a quarter of an acre. So 

 enthusiastic had I become from much reading of 

 Sorghum reports that I would gladly have filled 

 all my space with the seed. But having never 

 held the plow or hoed corn, I could not cultivate 

 my land in person, and felt troubled as to how 

 my pantry was to be supplied with syrup. For- 

 tunately we have a neighbor, a staid, worthy dea- 

 con, who thoroughly understands farming, and 

 when I told him about my land he kindly oifered 

 to "take it to the halves," as we call it here in the 

 countr3\ Now this pleased me vei-y much, but 

 how in the world should I manage about my 

 " Sorglmm Saccliaratum'7 I had a strong suspi- 

 cion that the deacon would laugh at "hobbies" 

 and "newspaper farming," and it was therefore 

 with a very modest manner that I said, "Deacon, 

 I should like very well to try a little of the new 

 sugar cane." 



"Yes, yes," said he, "so should I ; I have read 

 a great deal about it in the papers, and 'sugar 

 has ris' so much that it will be quite an object if 

 ■we can make some ourselves." Unfortunately, 

 as I then thought, potatoes, too, "had ris," and in 

 the Deacon's judgment it would be well to raise 

 a few bushels and a little corn. 



We consented, at the same time thinking how 

 nice it would be if we could have it all in sugar 

 cane. "Sugar cane" on our New England soil ! 

 How it would remind us of the sunny tropics. 

 But with a wonderful degree of reticence we lim- 

 ited ourselves to two hundred and thirty-four 

 hills of the sorghum. 



Time passed — corn and potatoes grew apace, 

 ■while the sugar cane plants looked like poor sick- 

 ly little foreigners, in an uncongenial clime. Our 

 manure was guano and hen manure. In a few 

 ■weeks, however, the sugar cane began to "pick 

 up," and look aiound, as if astonished to find 

 such a hot sun in our skies ; it grew apace, leav- 

 ing its country cousin, the Indian corn, quite in 

 the shade. And now, indeed, we rejoiced in our 



goodly crop, and the Deacon would sometimes 

 come by five o'clock in a summer morning and 

 smack his lips in anticipation of the sweet juices 

 that were maturing in the rapidly growing cane. 

 Why, Mr. Editor, you could almost hear it grow, 

 as to seeing there was no mistake. The Deacon 

 counted the stalks, and calculated three half- 

 pints of juice to every hill. He now took little 

 heed of corn and potatoes — they were old ac- 

 quaintances, and forsaken for our more showy 

 stranger. 



When Autumn came, as good luck would have 

 it, a neighbor who lived on the river a short dis- 

 tance from the village, constructed a small mill, 

 consisting of two horizontal iron rollers for crush- 

 ing the cane, and two feeding rollers. Near this he 

 put up a boiler for preparing the syrup. I wish, 

 Mr. Editor, you could have gone with me to 

 "Uncle Noah's," in syrup time. You would have 

 enjoyed it. He is a wide-awake man, dead-set 

 against all tyranny, from that of the Russian 

 Czar down to our birch-loving district school 

 master. It would disturb him to see a woman 

 vote, and if he was town lister, would have no 

 desire to assess a tax upon the small, hardly- 

 earned property of a widow or maiden lady. No, 

 he firmly believes that taxation and representa- 

 tion should go together. He says that with all 

 the new spectacles he can procure he can't read 

 the Declaration of Independence in any other 

 way than that all men have a right to life, liberty 

 and pursuit of happiness, and he is so stupid 

 that he don't know what Mr. Choate means by 

 •'glittering generalities," for to him they are plain 

 truths. It would have pleased you to see him 

 crushing the cane. 



He was to take our cane and manufacture it 

 for one-half of the syrup. We had seventy gal- 

 lons of juice, but from these seventy gallons we 

 obtained but seven gallons of syrup. There came 

 a sudden, early frost, which injured the cane so 

 that we thought it would not yield so much sac- 

 charine matter. 



You will perceive tliat our share from the 234 

 hills was three and a half gallons. Now the 

 deacon had to strip the leaves from all the stalks 

 before they could be crushed, and the frost had 

 made them adhere closer, and increased the la- 

 bor. Then there was the expense of transporta- 

 tion to and from the mill, all of which brought 

 up our three and a half gallons of syrup to quite 

 a respectable price. At last it was completed, 

 and the decaon tasted — we tasted, the children 

 tasted, and one looked at the other, then we 

 tasted again, then a silence. I wanted to say it 

 was good, but I couldn't tell a lie. The deacon 

 finally said he liked it, and he thought the more 

 one ate of it, the better they would like it. We 

 tried the experiment, and kept a tumbler of it 

 near us through the day, and occasionally tasted 

 as we have seen old women do with herb tea, 

 but our palates were inexorable ; we could not 

 like it, and finally we told the deacon if he would 

 take the whole for the labor of preparing the 

 stalks and the expense of transporting them to 

 the mill, we would conclude the bargain. He as- 

 sented, and we thought he had the hardest share, 

 if he was to eat the syrup. So you see, Mr. Ed- 

 itor, we furnished land, seed and manure — and 

 learned wisdom. I ought to add that our Indian 

 corn was good, and ripened very well, notwith- 



