n it. This one plantation
produces twenty million pounds of coffee annually and there are thirty
railroad stations upon it.

A well kept coffee tree is about twelve feet high when full grown. The
leaves are a shiny green, a little like holly. The trees bloom in
September and fill the air with fragrance. As the white blossoms fade
the berries begin to form. May is the harvest time. Harvest hands come
in large numbers as they do in Kansas or the Dakotas during the wheat
harvest. Workmen are paid according to the amount they gather and some
of them gather fifty pounds a day.

The coffee berries are first stripped from the tree then raked and piled
into baskets. Next they are run through a machine that takes the bean
out of the covering, then into tanks of water where they are thoroughly
washed and then comes the drying process. It used to take weeks to get
the coffee beans well dried and men had to watch and keep stirring the
piles continually, but quite recently a new process was discovered by
which they are dried by steam.

After the coffee beans are thoroughly dried they are run through rollers
that break the skin covering and great ventilators blow the chaff away.
Then the beans are poured into a gigantic sieve with different sized
holes which are chutes in reality and from which endless streams of
coffee graded according to size run into a large room. At each stream
stand women who pick out imperfect or damaged grains. The coffee is then
sacked and is ready for shipment. The ordinary bag of coffee weighs
about one hundred and twenty pounds. Santo is the great coffee port and
here can be seen ships from every civilized land taking on cargoes of
coffee. If it is well kept coffee gets better with age, so it can be
piled in great warehouses for months or even years and not deteriorate.
Nearly a dozen million bags of coffee are shipped from Santo annually
and as we are the greatest coffee drinkers in the world about half of
the entire crop comes to us.

Formerly many of the coffee plantations were worked by slaves. Negroes
were brought from South Africa, as they were brought to work in the
cotton fields in the south in anti-slavery days. In the year 1888 Brazil
freed her slaves and the sudden freeing of a half million slaves almost
demoralized the coffee and sugar industries of the country. Many of
these negroes thought that freedom meant that they would never have to
work any more and they became loafers and often cri