The waste stems when squeezed dry are generally used for fuel to boil the juice, but they are so full of flint, that masses of glassy slag are constantly found in the furnaces, and require to be removed.

It seems strange that so valuable a plant as the sugar cane was quite unknown to the ancients, and that amid all the luxuries sought after, by the Greeks and Romans, sugar should have been neglected. Some of their earliest writers mention a sweet salt, that was used in medicine, and recommend a small piece of it to be laid upon the tongue to relieve the thirst in fever. This sweet salt is supposed to have been sugar, and if so, it continued to be taken as physic for many hundred years.

I need scarcely say that in these days sugar is esteemed one of the necessaries of life; indeed, it would seem a terrible hardship to do without it. It is not only very nice, but very nourishing, and a small quantity will sustain life, and enable persons to undergo fatigue better than any other substance. A traveller tells us that he has often crossed the burning sand of the desert, and when wearied with heat and fatigue, has sat down under the shade of a tree to refresh himself with his traveller's fare, a few balls of sugar, mixed

M

with spices and hardened into a paste with flour. Two or three of these balls, and a draught of water, have invariably restored his strength, and caused him to set off again with renewed vigour.

In Cochin China, horses, mules, and elephants, are all fattened upon sugar, and the body guard of the king have a sum of money allowed them daily to buy sugar canes, which they are obliged to eat in order to preserve their good looks. In tropical climates the fresh juice of the cane is found to be a remedy for many diseases, and it is well known that the plague never visited any country where sugar was abundantly used. Sugar is particularly wholesome for children, and the love of it seems implanted in them by nature. The idea that it injures the teeth is quite unfounded, as the negroes who feed constantly upon it, are remarkable for the whiteness and soundness of their teeth.

Happily, the poor slaves who used to cultivate the cane with so much cruel labour are now free. Throughout the whole of the British colonies there is not a single slave to be found, and if a fugitive can only succeed in setting his foot upon English ground he has nothing more to fear.

"They touch our country and their shackles fall."

"That's noble-and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing; spread it then, And let it circulate thro' every vein

Of all your empire-that where Britain's power is felt, Mankind may feel her mercy too."

Chapter the Fourteenth.

GRASSES (continued)-THE BAMBOO.

If you were to go into a tropical forest and see the giant trees shooting up on either side, so tall and straight, you would be filled with awe and wonder. But how should you ever guess that yonder bamboo, whose branches rise almost to the clouds, and are surmounted by a plume of feathery leaves, tossing to and fro like waves of emerald green, is nothing more than a tree grass? But this is really the case, and magnificent as it looks, it has just the same character as the humble plants I have been describing in a previous chapter. Its true stem, instead of being buried underground, rises like the trunk of a tree, and is hollow, except that at intervals it forms the same solid knots or joints which are found in the grasses. The stamens and pistils too are enclosed in scales or glumes, and in fact, the bamboo agrees with the grasses in every essential particular, and differs mostly in size.

The impression produced by the first sight of a forest of bamboo, is almost overwhelming, and I will give you an account of it, nearly in the very words of a modern traveller.*

Early in the morning of a beautiful autumnal day, I set out for a journey to the hills and thickly wooded regions of the Malabar coast. When I awoke in my palanquin, I hardly knew where I was. I sat up, drew the curtain gently back, and looking out, saw the grandest sight my eyes had ever beheld. I seemed to be travelling among the columns of some enchanted cathedral, compared to which the minster at York appeared a mere baby-house. The ground on all sides was free from underwood, and so flat and smooth it might have been paved with flag-stones. From this level surface rose on every hand, as far as the eye could penetrate, immense clumps or clusters of bamboos; these clusters being at the base from six feet to thirty, or even to twice that width, as I afterwards found by measuring. For about ten feet from the ground, each of the clusters preserved a forin nearly cylindrical, after which they began gradually to curve outwards. They rose in the air to the height of eighty or even a

*Captain Basil Hall.