Demerara Sugar Production. 17 
fire for more than a few hours at a time, and then wring- 
ing wet and thoroughly exhausted he had to be relieved ; now 
one rarely sees a wet shirt. The army of boxmen shov- 
ing the trucks, and girls carrying the megass to the stoke 
hole, are no longer required ; the estate saves about $2 a 
ton in wages, and if the factory is well arranged, and the 
juice fairly good, no other fuel than megass is required. 
I said at the beginning of these papers that no regard 
should be paid to anything but dollars and cents, but here 
I must digress and point out the enormous improvement 
in the comfort of the present system of sugar making. 
Who that has ever had to keep a watch in the old time 
buildings can ever forget that copper-wall ? Especially 
towards the end of the crop. The estate could not stop, 
the rains had begun, and the canes were beginning to take 
a * second spring' ; besides there were reasons connected 
with the estate's finance and the rotation of the crop 
which compelled the manager reluctantly to go on with 
the sugar making. The dams are bad and the mules 
fagged out, the megass is only half dry, and it is a miser- 
able work. To give an idea of the worst, let us imagine 
a Saturday night towards the end of December. The 
estate has been grinding for some months, the rain is fall- 
ing heavily, and owing to the weather, and the dams being 
deep in mud, it is late before the number of clarifiers set 
as the day's task is filled. 
It is about eight o'clock in the evening, and the mill has 
just stopped. The coppers on the wall are boiling 
heavily, the fuel is i heavy' and the flues are not clean. 
All the clarifiers are full, there is no room for syrup, and 
the pans have as much as they can do to convert all the 
thin syrup that is already in the subsiders into sugar 
C 
