104 TlMEHRI. 
workers from India, China, and Barbados, have been 
taught in the school of adversity that if they want to reap 
and eat, they must sow and labour, a new departure may 
be considered as having overtaken the colony. 
The praiseworthy attempt made by Mr. COLVIN to grow 
rice on a large scale in Canal No i, and by the Company 
which started under such favourable circumstances at 
Vive-la-Force, both failed from similar causes — want of 
practical knowledge of the land and seasons, and also 
want of a water supply — to which I ought to add, the 
stubbornness and want of belief on the part of the 
labourer employed in carrying out details. 
The next practical test came under my own observa- 
tion and encouragement about 1865, when a couple of 
hill coolies asked me to allow them to have 16 acres in 
front of Edinburgh house for rice growing. Seeing the 
heavy work of breaking up the land, I suggested bullocks 
and the plough, to which they readily agreed, and when 
I thought I was doing a great thing in adding a couple 
of Yankee eagle ploughs to the oxen, they said in their 
looks " Poor buckra, he no sabe." Instead of my ploughs 
and harness, I found them with a mangrove root shaped 
into an Egyptian plough with a long stick leading up 
to the yoke, the latter being a straight courida stick 
with two holes bored at such distances from each end 
as to admit of two pins being driven through, one on each 
side of the bullock's neck j these were tied under the 
throat with a piece of string. When the team was ready 
to operate — and the way those coolies managed a pair 
of oxen direct out of the pasture was a sight worth 
seeing — they disturbed and worked up the surface of the 
land into such a puddle as would have disgusted an 
