before them to the quarters, and evoked responsive barks and shouts from the dogs and children there.
It was the busy time of the year, and the anxious time too,—the roulaison. It was the period to which the rest of the year led up, the chronological terminus of calculation and cultivation, when the fields with their accumulated interest of labor and capital were delivered over for judgment to the sugar-house. Always dominating the place, the material importance of the sugar-house became tyrannical, oppressive, as cane-cutting approached. It reared itself—an ugly, square, red-brick structure—menacingly before the fields; it dwarfed the "big house" into insignificance, and, with its vast shed, divided by the cane-carrier, its chimneys, furnaces, boiler, bagasse-heaps, its mountainous wood-pile and barricade of new hogsheads, it shut out the view of the river from the quarters, and consigned the latter to a species of seclusion. What its verdict would be, was now the one item of interest to all, from the oldest graybeard to the youngest thinker on "Bel Angely" plantation. What the sugar-house decided,
