for the most profitable cultivation, it requires replanting every year for the subsequent year's crop.

The majority of the plantations in Lower Louisiana, said to be good for little else but sugar and sweet potatoes, were waste and unavailable. St. Mary's Parish had been almost entirely abandoned. The cane had run out; seed-cane was not to be had; and to recommence the culture an outlay of capital was necessary, from which no such immediate, bountiful returns could be anticipated as from the culture of cotton.

The sugar region and the cotton belt overlap each other. Cane may be cultivated to some extent as far north as 34°, while cotton ranges as far south as 30°, although it can scarcely be considered a safe or profitable crop much below 31°. In 1850 there were in Louisiana 4205 cotton and 1558 sugar plantations. This year cotton is not only king, but a usurper, holding with uncertain tenure much of the special province of sugar.

Good cotton plantations in Louisiana yield a bale (of five hundred pounds) to the acre. The sugar crop varies from five hundred to thirty-five hundred pounds, according to the fitness of the soil, the length of the season, and the mode of culture. A hogshead of eleven hundred and fifty pounds to the acre, is about an average crop.

Five different varieties of cane are used by the planters of Louisiana. The cuttings from which it is propagated are called "seed-cane.". They are cut in September, and laid in "mats," -a sort of stack adapted to protect them from frost. Cane is usually planted between the months of October and March. Two or three stalks are laid together in prepared rows seven feet apart, and covered by five or six inches of soil. This is called the "mother-cane." In cold soil it rots, and is eaten by vermin. The first year's growth is called "plantcane," and is ploughed and hoed like corn. On being cut, new stalks spring up from the roots. These subsequent year's stalks are called rattoons, a West Indian word, derived from the Spanish retonó, (retoñar, to sprout again,) which was probably imported into Louisiana, together with the Creole cane, by the refugees from St. Domingo, in 1794.

DESCRIPTION OF A SUGAR-MILL.

413

"There's nothing handsomer," said my friend Dick Pthe overseer, "than a field of cane on the first of June, high as your head, all green, a thousand acres, waving and shining in the wind." It is a lively scene when a gang of fifty or sixty negroes, armed with knives, enter such a field in the fall, and the cutting begins.

I was desirous of seeing a sugar-mill in operation, but could hear of none within convenient visiting distance. The scene is thus described in a letter written by a Northern lady whose husband was last year working a Louisiana plantation:

"I am sitting in the gallery of a building two hundred and fifty feet long. This gallery was made expressly for the white overseer, and overlooks all that is going on in the main building. There is a sleeping-room in each end of it, and a large open space in the middle which serves as a dining-room; here I am writing. In the opposite end of the building I can see the engine which carries all the machinery; just this side of it are the great rollers that crush the cane, and the apron, or feed-carrier, that carries the cane from the shed outside up to the crushers.

"Just this side of the crushers are four large vats that receive the juice. From these it is carried into two large kettles, where the lime is put in, and the juice is raised to the boiling-point, and then skimmed. From these kettles the juice is transferred by means of a bucket attached to a long pole, to the next kettle, where it is worked to the right consistency for clarifying.

"This done, it is conveyed, by means of a steam-pump, to the filtering room, where it is passed into large vats filled with burnt bones, called bone black, through which it is filtered, and thus freed from all impurities. From these filters it is run off into a large cistern, and pumped up by the same steam-pump into tanks, where, by means of faucets, it is drawn into the sugaring-off pan. In this pan it is heated by means of a coil of pipe that winds round and round till it fills the bottom of the pans and carries the steam which, in from fifteen to twenty minutes, finishes the boiling process. From this pan it is let off into a box car, set on a railroad track which runs up and down between the coolers, which are ranged along each side of this end of the building, like pews in a church.

"The Creoles along the coast have looked with amazement all sum

mer upon our success with free black laborers, and have been obliged to acknowledge that they never saw a more cheerful, industrious set of laborers in all their experience. But wait till sugar-making comes,' they have said, 'and then see if you can get off your crop without the old system of compulsion. Your niggers will flare up when you get off your ten-hour system. They are not going to work

night and day, and you cannot get off the crop unless they do.'

"White sugar-makers presented themselves, telling us, in all sobriety, 'Niggers cannot be trusted to make sugar,' and offering, with great magnanimity, to oversee the matter for five hundred dollars. J-declined all such friendly offers, and last Monday morning commenced grinding cane. The colored men and women went to work with a will, no shirking or flinching. The cutters pushed the handlers, the handlers pushed the haulers, and so on, night and day, each gang taking their respective watches, and all moving on with the regularity of clock-work.

"And so the business went on with black engineers, black crushers, black filterers, black sugar-makers,- all black throughout,but the sugar came out splendid in quantity and quality. Sixty hogsheads of sugar, finished by Saturday night, and things in readiness for the Sabbath's rest, is acknowledged by old planters to be the largest run ever made in this sugar-house for the first week of the sugar season. So they gape and stare, and wonder that humanity and justice can bring forth more profitable results than the driver's whip."

Louisiana has been the great sugar-growing State of the Union. For several years before the war, the annual crop varied from 100,000 to 450,000 hogsheads. In 1864 less than nine thousand hogsheads were produced. In 1865 the crop amounted to between sixteen and seventeen thousand hogsheads, less than was raised in 1860 on four plantations!

Attempts were being made to introduce white laborers into Louisiana. While I was there, one hundred Germans, who had been hired in New York for a sugar plantation, were landed in New Orleans. Within twenty-four hours thirty of them deserted for higher wages; by which trifling circumstance planters, who had hoped to exchange black for white labor, were very much disgusted.

CAPTURE OF STEAMER "WATER-WITCH." 415

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE BATTLE OF MOBILE BAY.

LEAVING New Orleans for Mobile at half-past four o'clock, by the usual route, I reached Lake Ponchartrain by railroad in time to take the steamer and be off at sunset.

The lake, with its low, dark-wooded shores, and its placid, glassy waters, unruffled by a breeze, outspread under the evening sky, was a scene of solitary and tranquil beauty. Here its breast was burnished with the splendors of a reflected cloud, which faded, leaving upon the darkening rim of the lake the most delicate belts of green, and blue, and violet, until these faded in their turn, and the gloomy surface appeared sprinkled all over with molten stars. Strange constellations rose in the Southern hemisphere; while others about the opposite pole, which never set in the latitude of the Northern States, were below the horizon. The "Dipper" was dipped in the lake. I had never seen the North Star so low before.

I walked the deck with the mate, who had been a good Rebel, and was concerned in the capture of the United States steamer"Water Witch."

"I had command of one of the boats," said he. "There was a consultation of officers, and it was proposed to make the attack that night at eleven o'clock; we would have the tide with us then. For that very reason,' I said, 'I would postpone it until two. Then we shall have the tide against us. It will be harder pulling down to her, but we can board better, and if we miss grappling the first time we shan't drift by and get fired upon; and if we fail, we can come back on the tide.""

The steamer was surprised, and the boarding was a success. "The officer in command of our party was killed, and the

command devolved upon me. I got three wounds, one through this arm, one across my stomach, and one through the fleshy part of my thigh. But I laid out a man for each wound. I got to the cabin, and had my sword at the captain's throat, and would have run him through, if he had n't been mighty glib in his speech: I surrender! I surrender!' He didn't stammer a bit! Do you surrender your command?' 'Yes, yes! I do! And in a minute I stopped the fighting."

This is the style of story one hears travelling anywhere in the South. Lying in my berth in the cabin, I was kept awake half the night by Rebel soldiers relating similar adventures.

The next morning we were in the Gulf of Mexico. We had entered by the South Pass, the tide being unfavorable for an inside passage between the islands and the coast. It was a summer-like, beautiful day. Gulls and pelicans were sailing around and over the steamer and sporting on the waves. On