The great hotels and many restaurants of the city are noted throughout the United States. The creole cooks have made famous such dishes as chicken gumbo, chicken à la creole, and pompano. The country around New Orleans is one of the richest in the world. Within a few hours' ride of the city are great fields of cotton, sugar, and rice. Two hundred miles from the city are immense deposits of sulphur and salt. Oil fields are within easy reach, and coal is brought by water from the mines of Alabama and even from Pennsylvania. Great forests to the north furnish lumber which is transported by water to the city, making New Orleans one of the foremost ports in lumber exportation. The immense sugar-cane fields of the South look very much like the cornfields of the more northern states. Negroes cut the cane close to the ground, as the lower part of the stalk has the most sugar. After the leaves and tops have been trimmed off, the stalks are shipped to the presses, cut into small pieces, and crushed between heavy rollers. The juice is strained, boiled, and worked over to remove the impurities, and then, in a brownish mass called raw sugar, is sent to great refineries to be made by more boiling and other processes into the white sugar we use daily. This sugar industry is very important, as figures show that each American, both grown-ups and children, consumes an average of more than seventy pounds of sugar a year. [Illustration: A SUGAR-CANE FIELD] [Illustration: A SUGAR REFINERY] Away down South is the land of cotton as well as the land of sugar, and there is no more beautiful sight than a field white with the opening bolls of the cotton plant. Between the long white rows pass the picturesque negroes with their big baskets into which they put the soft fleecy cotton as they pick it from the bolls. The raw cotton is then sent to the cotton gin, where the seeds are taken out to be made into cottonseed oil. The cotton itself is shipped to factories where it is made into thread and cotton cloth of all kinds. In addition to the immense quantities sent to the mills in various parts of the United States, New Orleans ships to Europe each year over $100,000,000 worth. When the cotton reaches the city it is in the form of bales covered with coarse cloth and bound with iron bands. The great steamers waiting at the dock must fill their holds to the best advantage in order that they may carry as large an amount as possible on each voyage. The cotton as it comes from the plantation presses occupies too much space. It is interesting to stand near the steamship landings and see the workmen cast off the iron bands and place the bales between the powerful jaws of huge presses which seem, almost without effort, to close down upon the mass of fleecy whiteness and cause it to shrink from four feet to about one foot in thickness. While the cotton is still under pressure, iron bands are once more placed upon it, and the bale is then taken from the press.