I confess to feeling interested
on
being told that the stream of muddy liquid issuing from the crushed
canes and trickling gaily down its wooden gutters, would ultimately
figure as the lump-sugar of our breakfast-tables. There is also a
peculiarly fascinating apparatus known as a vacuum-pan, peeping into
which, through a little tale window, a species of brown porridge
transforms itself into crystallised sugar of the sort known to
housekeepers as "Demerara" under your very eyes; and another equally
attractive, rapidly revolving machine in which the molasses, by
centrifugal force, detaches itself from the sugar, and runs of its own
accord down its appointed channels to the rum distillery, where
Alice's Dormouse would have had the gratification of seeing a real
treacle-well. In this latter place, where the smell of the fermenting
molasses is awful, only East Indian coolies can be employed, a West
Indian negro being unable to withstand its alcoholic temptations.
After seeing all the lions of the island, we drifted as paying guests
to a school for little white boys on the north coast.
The surroundings of this school were ideally beautiful. It stood on a
promontory jutting into the sea, with a coral reef in front of it, but
shut in as it was by the hills, the heat of the place was unbearable,
and the little white boys all looked pathetically pale and "peaky.
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