Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/141

Rh extends into the building, where upon an elevation are placed two broad mill-stones, turning in opposite directions, the one raised a little above the other. By the side of this trough stand women who pass the canes onward and up to the grinding mill-stones (I have seen a couple of young women at work here who really were splendidly beautiful, with their dark glancing eyes, their white teeth, their coral necklaces round their throats, and the pink handkerchiefs bound round their heads) where stands a negro on a landing-place, who is called the feeder, his business being to see that all the canes pass regularly between the mill-stones. The juice is pressed out with every half revolution of the stones, and the canes which enter between them from above fall down, crushed dry, into another trough below, whence they are conveyed away by an opposite door, and then heaped up into another wagon drawn by oxen, which, as soon as it is loaded, moves off and gives place to another. This wagon, loaded with la bagaza, goes to the flagged pavement, where women unload it into baskets, and lay it out to dry as we have already seen. On one side of the building, in which the sugar-cane is ground, stands a house containing the machinery which sets the wheels in motion, and which is worked principally by oxen, which are driven as the oxen with us in the operation of thrashing. There is a driver to each pair of oxen, and it is from these that the shouts and the kind of stamping sound proceed which are heard at night. A negro shouts aloud words which he invents for the occcasion, and which are often entirely without meaning, and the others respond in chorus, repeating with some variation the given words. The shouts and the noises are unmelodious, but the negroes enliven themselves in this manner during their nocturnal labour.

The juice which flows from the crushed canes, flows between the millstones, into a porcelain trough, placed in a transverse direction to the great trough extending