not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted;
and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president.
We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some
of those done us by Jackson’s presidency.
The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality
of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale.
We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine
travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot;
then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward
itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane.
The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep.
The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted.
When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near
the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes
rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider
that could stay on it.
The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres;
six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful
orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is
cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion,
too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe;
but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details.
However, this year’s crop will reach ten or twelve hundred
tons of sugar, consequently last year’s loss will not matter.
These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield
of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre;
which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was
in my time.
The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with
little crabs–‘fiddlers.’ One saw them scampering sidewise
in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise.
Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees,
and ruin them.
The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks
and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery.
The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting.
First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out
the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract
the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol;
then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses;
then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through
the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market.
I have jotted these particulars down from memory.
The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself.
To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things
in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible.
If you will examine your own supply every now and then
for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find
that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand
into it.
We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads’
great work, the ‘jetties,’ where the river has been compressed between walls,
and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go,
since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible.
We could have visited that ancient and singular burg,
‘Pilot-town,’ which stands on stilts in the water–so they say;
where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to
the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest
boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious
children are with the velocipede.
We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time,
we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was
a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental
and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug’s pet parrot,
whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always
this-worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance
of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed–