Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/486

426 it wholly worthless for European use. The sugar-cane is crushed in a hollowed log, sometimes the stump of a tree as it stands rooted in the ground. The beam used as a pestle is attached to a shaft which is turned by a couple of oxen, and the juice drawn off by a hole pierced in the bottom of the trunk. This liquor, full of impurities, is then boiled down, and crystallized in black cakes that would hardly be recognised by us as sugar. The Palhully sugar company, with their steam refinery, convert it into a very excellent and beautiful article. The only hinderance to their success is the great cost of transportation to Madras. This is a hinderance not only to this, but to a thousand other useful arts. When Christianity shall have made Hindus truthful and industrious, civilization will go forward, and the wealth of India be a hundred-fold increased. Without mutual confidence, there cannot be association; and without association, there cannot be improvement. What India wants to make her a happy land is the influences of the religion of the Bible.

The drive of eight miles from Palhully to Mysore would have but little to attract the traveller accustomed to Indian scenes, though