OX-CART.
The streets of the business portion are narrow, and there are traces of Flemish architecture in the buildings erected during the time when Count Moritz of Nassau and his followers were domiciled in Pernambuco. There are houses of many stories, such as we see in cities of Holland, but rarely find in the tropics, where the effort of ascending a stairway is one of the trials of existence. Farther on the streets are wide, and run in straight lines, and they have broad sidewalks, tracks for street cars, and handsome dwellings that might have come from Philadelphia or Baltimore. There are several public edifices that would be creditable anywhere; the market is a model of beauty and good arrangement, and the squares and gardens are handsome and spacious. Time did not permit an excursion into the country nor a visit to one of the sugar plantations in the neighborhood.
Frank learned that within the last few years the most enterprising of the sugar-planters have gone to refining the product of their plantations by means of machinery, much to the consternation of the refiners of England and the United States. The sugar, after being boiled to crystallization, but containing a good deal of molasses, is placed in a cylinder perforated with thousands of small holes that seem to have been made with a pin. The cylinder is whirled around two thousand times a minute; the molasses is thrown off by centrifugal force and the sugar remains. Then a jet of water is introduced, and afterwards a jet of steam; water and steam wash the sugar perfectly clean, and it is then dried and broken into coarse powder. The whole work with the cylinder occupies only a few minutes; the molasses that is thrown off is boiled to make brown sugar, and the second molasses which comes from it is utilized for distillation.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
BAHIA AND ITS INDUSTRIES.—RIO JANEIRO.—THE BAY AND THE CITY.—SIGHTS OF THE CAPITAL.—EMPEROR DOM PEDRO II.
