Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/254

244 opening widely, is for the froth and scum, good and evil, to disport in. The boilers under fire are filled to the brim with this bubbling, which is constantly skimmed by workmen, with flat skimmers half a yard across. They deposit their refuse in a trough running along the front of the boilers, and this flows into other receptacles, to be distilled into the rum of the country. So the bane becomes more baneful by the banefulness of man.

The sirup is taken to other boilers, where it is condensed yet more, and is ladled into large earthen jars two feet long, of conical shape, with a hole in the bottom. These jars are set on earthen pots after a certain crystallization is attained, and the hole opened to let the uncrystallized centre drip away. They are covered with a blue clay, or marl, which is prepared carefully in a semi-liquid form; too liquid, it would permeate the sugar; too dry, not affect it. This black mud absorbs the yellow color, and makes the mulatto white, not the usual result of mixing black and yellow together. The white is a little dingy, and Mexican sugar is not as white as the American, they not using sufficiently powerful absorbents.

These loaves of sugar, the shape and size of the jars, weigh an aroba, or twenty-five pounds. Each donkey or mule has twelve of these put on his back, three hundred-weight, and marches off to Mexico with his burden. You meet hundreds of mules thus loaded. When a civil engineer said to an administrador of a hacienda that railroads would cheapen freight, he replied he got his freighting for less than nothing now. "How so?" "My mules I raise, and their feed costs nothing. I give the driver two reals a day, and he buys his necessities at my store, on which I make a profit of a real above what I pay him. How is the railroad to help me?"

But it will help the two-real laborer, and give him more money and better chance for its investment.

The corn-husks are dragged into the court, spread, dried, and used for fuel the next day. The fuel ready for to-morrow's burning was twenty feet high and wide, and two hundred feet long, the refuse of a single day. The clay, after serving as an absorbent, is