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SUGAR ESTATES.
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refreshing, and the whole of the next day we spent in wandering about or sitting lazily amongst the magnificent orange trees and cocoas of this fine hacienda. Here the orange trees are the loftiest we had yet seen; long ranges of noble trees, loaded with fruit and flowers. At the back of the house is a small grove of cocoas, and a clear running stream passing through beautiful flowers, and refreshing everything in its course. Indeed, all through tierra caliente, except on the barren hills, there is a profusion of the most delicious water, here at once a necessity and a luxury.

These sugar estates are under high cultivation, the crops abundant, the water always more than sufficient both for the purposes of irrigation and for machinery, which A —— considers equal to anything he has seen in Jamaica. They produce annually from thirty to fifty thousand arrobas of sugar. The laborers are free Indians, and are paid from two and a half to six and a half reals per day. I believe that about one hundred and fifty are sufficient for working on a large estate. Bountiful nature, walking on the traces of civil war, fills up the ravages caused by sanguinary revolutions, and these estates in the valley of Cuernavaca, which have so frequently been theatres of bloodshed, and have so often changed proprietors, remain in themselves as fertile and productive as ever.:

In the evening we visited the trapiche, as they call the sugar-works, the sugar-boilers, warehouses, storerooms and engines. The heat is so intense among these great boilers, that we could not endure it for