It is a pleasant excursion on a fine day in autumn, when the beet flourishes still green in the fields, and the roots are nearly ripe for pulling, to drive out from Lille, as we did some years ago, among the country farmers ten or twelve miles around. The land is so rich and promising, and on the whole so well tilled—and yet in the hands of good English or Scotch farmers might, we fancy, be made to yield so much more, and to look so much nicer, and drier, and cleaner, that we enjoy at once the gratification which in its present condition it is sure to yield us, while we pleasantly flatter ourselves at the same time with the thoughts of what we could make it. That it is not badly cultivated the practical man will infer from the average produce of sugar beet being estimated about Lille at sixteen, and about Valenciennes at nineteen tons an acre. At the same time, that much improvement is possible he will gather from the fact that, though often strong and but little undulating, the land is still unconscious of thorough drainage, and of the benefits which underground tiles and broken stones have so liberally conferred upon us. The adjoining provinces of Hainault and Brabant—which the traveller leaves to the right on his way to Ghent and Brussels—are the seat of the sugar manufacture in Belgium. There the average yield of beetroot is said to be from eighteen to twenty-four tons an acre, the land in general being excellent, while the total produce of beet-sugar in Belgium is ten millions of pounds. In Belgium, as in France, the home-growth of sugar is equal to about one-half of the home consumption.