On the site of the ancient Indian village of Labcah La Compañía Agricola has built itself a settlement which it has rechristened Solferino. On our arrival there we had the kindest welcome possible from the Cuban superintendent, who entertained us at a hastily improvised lunch what time he insisted on sending on in advance of us a message to the officials at the sugar plantation some ten miles off to prepare them for our visit. The company is one of the richest in Yucatan, chiefly owing to the great saline lagoons over which we had passed, from which is extracted rough salt, for the sale of which they practically have a monopoly throughout Northern and Western Yucatan, exporting large quantities as well to Vera Cruz and other ports on the Mexican gulf. They have also undertaken chicle-cutting, and at Solferino are opening up many acres of woodland for plantations of cocoa, cotton, and banana. This latter settlement showed every sign of their growing prosperity, being quite the model village, with trim huts fronting on to large corrals filled with cattle and mules. Thence late in the afternoon we started for their sugar farm, which is the industry latest initiated, but in which, as we afterwards learnt, there is not so much profit as their enterprise deserves, because of the cheap American sugars which are rapidly becoming a vast import throughout Yucatan. Heading northward again, we were soon once more among the swamps, the forests thinning off and giving place to a low-lying country, just the steaming hot, miasmic soil for sugar. A few miles further and we entered the first plantations, each side of us stretching acres of the rusty-green rush-like plants topping the purple yellowy canes, each plantation marked with a board bearing the date of planting and the number of _mecates_[4] in the patch. Ahead of us we soon saw the tall brick chimney of the sugar mill, and then, as far as the eye could see, sugar-cane stretched on either side of the track till we entered the settlement. First a street of wooden huts, each built up on a platform two feet from the ground, and reached by a few wood steps like those of a bathing-machine, and then a wide clearing; on one side the sugar mill, a huge shed-like erection, on the other the large one-storeyed bungalow, built of Mexican cedar, the administrative building of the plantation. Here we were greeted by the chief administrator of the Company with such courteous kindness as made us feel deeply the disadvantage we laboured under in being such poor Spanish scholars. Señor Sanchez was but fifty, though he looked an old man. The stooping shoulders, the thin wasted figure, the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, the dried yellow skin, told only too sadly their tale of bitter battle waged with the fever fiend. For here where sugar grows men wither, and the little cemetery, lying a mile seaward behind the mill and established but a few years, could already boast a larger census than the settlement.