OLDING a precious possession barely within the reach of men, where they must struggle and strive to obtain it, seems to be a favorite method of Nature. Without doubt it is for the betterment of the race that the necessaries of life should not fall too easily into the hand, but sometimes the severity of the strife is exhausting. On the other hand, success in reaching the treasure often is in the nature of a triumph of which we may be justly proud, despite the fact that Nature is prodigally generous when her gifts are finally reached. Success in taking sugar from the beet, as a commercial proposition, may be fairly so classed.

When man comes to see how we make sugar out of beets, I never burden him with details until he has first been

to the top of the lime kilns for a good look around; for the industry involves such enormous quantities of material, so many thousands of acres, so many millions of dollars, that one needs to gaze over about three counties for a while in order to catch the idea.

The accommodating reader will therefore imagine himself one hundred feet in the air on top of a galleried steel tower in the midst of a broad plain. If it be anywhere in the great, rainless west, he will easily define his territory by the boundaries of irrigating ditches. If it be in California, the black plowed soil stretches to the feet of the blue mountains, or the dunes along the coast. And he will at once see what many a promoter has lost sight of, that the industry (as all good industries should) springs from the soil. Without control and

earnest development of a handsome portion of the map, all the great structures, all the money and the men and the talk of markets and profits avail nothing.

Here, then, let him watch operations from the beginning. The surveyors are just about breaking camp; the muddy water flows for the first time in its new channels. Already appear in the distance long black strings of mules creeping by inches along the horizon, plowing; and in due time follow the sowers drilling the seed. Then the ditches, or the heavens, as the case may be, distribute water over the land, and the black area turns miraculously green.

Now, all this territory, say 20,000 acres, is under the control of one mana manager, for although no company hopes to own all the land it needs, it must control absolutely its operations. It distributes the required seed; superintends the plowing; sets the date for each planting; prescribes the manner of cultivation, harvesting and final delivery; and agrees beforehand what it will pay for the product (whatever the state of the weather or the markets), thus relieving the individual farmer of much uncertainty.

The manager's agricultural lieutenants, the gentlemen with the science and the strong French accent, are in the saddle all day long. Their subordinates, young chaps in khaki and sombreros, with mighty sunburned faces and the whole agricultural course of some university in the backs of their heads, are scattered over the entire map, bossing gangs of Mexicans and Japanese with a scattering of Zuni Indians.

And right here we come to a difficulty; for the beet is a very delicate organism, requiring much care. Corn you may cultivate with the aid of machinery sixty acres to the man; but beets must be thinned-that is, the thick sprouting plants must be selected out so that only one in ten plants that started shall mature the survival of the fittest in other words, spaced at scientifically determined intervals in precisely straight lines. This means that Antonio Apache or Signor Regolardo or Mr. Banzai Nippon or some other man with a hoe must go laboriously stooping on his knees and selecting and cutting for the distance of two and three-quarters miles for every acre he tends. And there must be hundreds of him. You see the little tents scattering away for miles. But there's never a free born leisure loving hobo in the district. They have all sought more congenial, less strenuous climes; and what we should do without a bit of yellow or brown or otherwise chromo-lithographic "peril" to work the fields for us is a very serious question.

So maneuvers a large army over 20,000 acres, obedient to one general. And every time it rains or hails or freezes within the field of operation, it is known immediately in every capital of the civilized world.

But at the very same time, while you watch from your tall tower, other great things are in progress. The foreground is all upheaved with excavations. Concrete piers are growing like mushrooms. Strings of wheelbarrows have been going back and forth for weeks. Improvised railroads over temporary

bridges are crawling about with steel girders and timbering. Derricks swing in the air, and the pneumatic riveter chatters noisily in what was recently a silent wilderness. Yonder men are digging wells and building a reservoir, for a water supply of ten million gallons a day is necessary for a large plant like this; also a fine sewerage system to carry the same amount away.

And there springs a town out of nothing. The surveyors' pegs have already given place to houses, an avenue, a park, an electric light plant and a bank. Who would imagine that a homely, long-tailed vegetable would occasion this amount of engineering!

The land is already green by the time the first columns are standing. The leaves grow alarmingly large ere the machinery is delivered on the ground. The dread question comes up, Will we be ready on time? A very exciting race between sun and rain on the one side and human endeavor on the other, with a million dollar stake. Twenty hours a day for seven days a week often comes to be the rule toward the last, and ere the walls have closed in on the steel framing, the agriculturists, who have been watching the barometer like a pointer dog and measuring the sugar in the beets in hundredths of a per cent, agree that the exact day of harvesting has arrived. For if they are too soon the sun will not have ripened the beets to sugar and if they are too late it will have converted it into glucose.

The appointed day of beginning is a

busy one. There go the army of field workers again, armed this time with flashing bolos instead of hoes, following after the long strings of mules and their curious two-pronged uprooting "pullers" imported from France. They seize the uprooted beets, the bolos flash, lopping off the green tops. With a good glass you may already have seen the neat little piles of white roots dotting the fields. Then come wagons, two in a string, drawn by mules ten in a string, all driven with one rein and a few well worn expletives, by the bronzed fellow in the saddle on one of the wheelers-precisely like the famous borax teams out of Death Valley.

All day and for a hundred days these teams will come creeping in from all quarters of the horizon; and for a hundred days they will be discharging their rich cargoes below you in the storage bins; and for a hundred days and a hundred nights, without ceasing, regardless of the Fourth of July, the Mikado's birthday and the otherwise holy Sabbath, the factory will continue to throb and roar and smoke by day and blaze by night.

Now we will do well to descend from the lime kiln (already uncomfortably hot) and watch proceedings within.

Those storage bins where the wagons discharge have each a swift stream of water running beneath-running in a flume to the factory. Down these flumes come the beets, floating and washing at the same time. First they are caught in an inclined spiral screw, supervised by

Signor Ramiris, and lifted into what looks like a large laundry machine with an armed shaft revolving in water. A laundry machine it is, capable of washing ninety tons of material every hour, under the management of Signor Agua Caliente. Right here you will mentally note that a sugar factory is about the dirtiest place you ever visited-for the very good reason that its purpose is to

AT THE SUGAR MILLS.

feeding from the bins. These men may never have seen a sugar mill before, nor even each other; they do not speak the same language; but they must nevertheless work together to put through ninety tons of beets an hour.

But to return to Bill on the battery. The battery is a succession of cells or large tanks arranged in a series with piping so that hot water may be run

the beets.

eliminate dirt and impurity. If the factory were not dirty the sugar would have to be, for it must come out somewhere.

With the mud and slime of the washing behind them, the clean white beets ascend in long bucket elevators to the top of the building, where, by following laboriously upstairs we shall find them discharging into a set of ingenious automatic scales-a German invention-presided over by Jan Jansen. From here they drop into the slicers-machines with a swift revolving disk below, carrying knives like a cucumber slicing board; and when they emerge from these they are no longer beets, but crisp, moist shreds sweet to taste like a raw turnip and called "cossettes," ready to be handled by Bill the battery man.

Now we have already passed what is to me the most wonderful part of the beet sugar industry. If Bill on the battery stops the cossette cutters, Jan Jansen must stop the elevators, which causes Signor Agua Caliente to stop the washers. Thereupon Antonio Ramiris must stop the beet screws, shut down the flume gate and signal to Banzai Nippon to stop

through them one after another. An opening at the top of each allows the sweet cossettes to enter-six tons to a filling. Then comes the hot water, percolating slowly through one after another till it discharges from the last a frothy purple liquid, rich in sugar, while the cossettes remain to be disposed of as "pulp" to the delectation of some thousands of cattle on surrounding

farms. But this is stating it in its very simplest terms, for observe that Bill must be able to empty or fill any cell without stopping the water; he must absorb all the sugar, yet leave behind the impurities that would come with it; he must gauge his temperatures, his quantities, his velocities for every kind of beets from every kind of land, and he must also get rid of the ninety tons of material each hour. Bill is the most accurate cook you ever beheld, and all the succeeding processes depend on his skill.

But the rich purple liquid-diffusion juice-runs into other large tanks and is mixed with slaked lime; whereupon it becomes a most pasty, uninviting mixture. This is to coagulate those gummy impurities which have unavoidably dissolved out in the battery-compare the action of the egg and the coffee grounds. The lime was burned in the kiln which formed our original point of observation. To further the process of purification the carbonic acid gas from the same kiln is blown into this pasty liquid until the burned lime becomes united once more with the gas it gave off in burning. The pasty liquid is then

more of a sandy liquid with the impurities in the sand.

We will think now of straining coffee through a cloth after the albumen of the egg and the grounds have united, and will proceed to the filter presses. Filter presses are devices in which the "juice" is strained through hundreds of sheets of duck or canvas which retain the lime mud and allow the sugar-bearing liquid to pass on. But it is not quite clear yet not till we have done this carbonating and filtering two or three times and finished with a treatment of sulphur fumes to destroy the most tenacious impurities yet remaining. Then we see it flowing away to the evaporators, a beautiful, pale amber color, to be boiled down to a thick syrup.

This thick syrup is pumped to the "vacuum pans" in charge of a corpulent, jolly Falstaffian man who is second to none save Bill on the battery. Falstaff understands the delicate art of creating the shining crystals that we know, out of this thick syrup. His fingers are as delicate of touch as a pianist's and his eye is like a microscope. You know how

easy it is to burn sugar in cooking it; but Falstaff continues to boil his at a very low temperature by exhausting the air from the interior of his "pan" with a suitable pump. As we watch him he is sampling the contents, spreading a bit of the boiled juice on a sheet of glass and scrutinizing the tiny crystals that begin to appear. This is the first time you have been able to see the sugar. His art consists in knowing how to make these tiny crystals grow regularly and even all of a size with clear, sharp edges. Otherwise the final product will be a dull looking substance. From watching him you will infer that the larger and sharper the crystals the better the sugar-which is true.

We now descend to Tim O'Harahan's centrifugal machines. These are circular steel baskets, made to spin with tremendous speed on the end of a suspended shaft, and lined with fine brass wire gauze. Tim is just opening the valve above to let in a charge of brown, mushy looking stuff which is the mixture of sugar crystals and molasses delivered from the vacuum pans. As the centrifu