64 
TPJNIDAD. 
I 
stem is left standing erect, and tlie field might be 
imagined full of troops, with arms shouldered and 
bayonets fixed. Three months after the arrow drops off, 
crop time commences, and crop is equivalent to harvest. 
It is a busy time, and from the same cause here as in 
happy England. There is much work to be done in a 
limited and an uncertain time. Hence, everything is in 
motion. All hands are busy. ]\Ien go out early in the 
morning with their sharp cutlasses, and mow down the 
canes at a rapid rate. Carts drawn by mules or oxen 
are busy carting the cane to the mill-yard, there to be 
squeezed either through the rollers of a cattle-mill (the 
old plan), or to be crunched or almost pulverised by 
passing through the triple rollers of a mill driven by a 
steam-engine. The remains of the cane, after the juice 
is thus squeezed out, is called magass or megass (the 
orthography does not seem to be settled), and serves 
when dried in the sun as fuel to boil the juice, or liquor 
as it is called, into sugar. 
The boiling-house is an important part of the “ works.” 
Several large round iron coppers are hung between two 
brick walls, a flue running under the set of five or six 
coppers. Into the mouth of this flue the megass is 
pushed with a forked stick, and so inflammable is this 
fuel that it will keep up a flame extending the Avhole 
length of the flue, causing the liquor in the coppers to 
boil furiously. Of course, where there is the greatest 
heat there the liquor will boil most quickly, and the 
copper that is farthest from the furnace mouth will boil 
last, or not at all. The liquor is forced by a pump (called 
the liquor-pump), worked by the engine, into the clarifiers. 
These are heated by the waste steam conducted into 
false bottoms. The liquor, being heated, throws Tip a 
white scum, which is carefully ladled ofl' by a strainer, 
which retains the scum and froth, but allows the liquor 
to run through. From the clarifier the liquor is let iloAvn 
by spouts into the first copper, where the heat is some- 
what greater, and more skimmings are taken off, and so 
