From the garden we went to the mills. The machinery in use had all been imported from England and the United States, via Cape Horn. There was first the crushing or grinding mill, from which a copper conductor carried the juice through a strainer into a vat, communicating by means of tubes with the coppers or cauldrons. From these, when the reduction and clarification were sufficiently far advanced, the liquid was drawn off into other coppers, whence the scum was constantly removed, and thrown into a large trough, to be used in the distillation of _aguardiente_. When reduced to a certain strength or thickness, the sugar was transferred to the coolers and strainers, where the graining took place, and the molasses was separated. A large portion of the sugar is not subjected to this process, but while in its crude state, is laded into moulds of a certain size, forming what is called _chancaca_, sold for ordinary consumption amongst the poorer classes, at a _quartillo_ (three cents) the cake, equivalent to about one cent and a half the pound. The finer qualities of sugar produced on this estate are nearly as white and hard as the refined sugars of commerce. Connected with these works is a complete apparatus for distilling _aguardiente_, capable of an indefinite production of that article of consumption. But this is a government _estanco_, or monopoly, and it cannot be manufactured on private account. The fact that the late Don Gregorio had obtained the contract for supplying the government, was one of the causes of hostility to him amongst the smaller proprietors, whose rude but costly modes of distillation were entirely supplanted by the introduction of his improved machinery. This hostility had not yet died out, and the family meditated throwing up the contract, and discontinuing the manufacture altogether, as the easiest mode of relieving themselves from the popular odium which it excited. We can hardly understand how such prejudices should exist, but it is nevertheless a fact that, at the first, every improvement in the useful arts, all social progress, and every advance in government, philosophy, and religion, have the world over been met and opposed in precisely the same spirit, and from precisely the same motives.