Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/482

466 sweet wild-flowers, to be pressed and carried away as souvenirs for our friends in the North, and re-mounting our horses, galloped towards the city.

On our way back we turned off from our road, and visited the great sugar ranch of San Antonio. The hacienda stands in a narrow cañon through which runs a small stream of pure water, and is surrounded by wide fields of luxuriant and rich-juiced cane, running up to the suburbs of the city. The sugar works are run by water-power, and though the crusher is of American make, all the other machinery and appliances are of the rudest and most primitive character.

The cane-juice is boiled in great, open, copper kettles set in brick-work, and is bailed from one to another until the last is reached, by naked-footed men, whose skin appears to be so indurated as to resist the action of the scalding fluid as thoroughly as the metal itself. The sugar, in its crude state, is placed in very large earthen moulds, wide at the top, and running to a point at the bottom, and covered with a peculiar clay made into a thin paste, which filtering through it, bleaches the mass to a pale brown color.

The sugar is sweet, and for coffee, fully equal to the article of a pale yellow hue called "coffee sugar" in the United States. This is the common product of the sugar haciendas of Mexico, and the process is that in general use all over the Republic from the Pacific to the Atlantic. With railways, a good and liberal system of revenue laws, and a few years of uninterrupted peace, Mexico could supply the United States, Canada, and much of Europe, with all the sugar required, and control the market of the world.

The coffee tree flourishes in the vicinity of Orizaba