rst place, a plantation of trees, and by the hundred acres. Economy
and taste led the planters, who were chiefly the French refugees from
Santo Domingo to select fruit trees, and trees valuable for their wood,
as well as pleasing for their beauty and shade. Under these plantations
of trees, grew the coffee plant, an evergreen, and almost an
ever-flowering plant, with berries of changing hues, and, twice a year,
brought its fruit to maturity. That the coffee might be tended and
gathered, avenues wide enough for wagons must be carried through the
plantations, at frequent intervals. The plantation was, therefore, laid
out like a garden, with avenues and foot-paths, all under the shade of
the finest trees, and the spaces between the avenues were groves of
fruit trees and shade trees, under which grew, trimmed down to the
height of five or six feet, the coffee plant. The labor of the
plantation was in tending, picking, drying, and shelling the coffee, and
gathering the fresh fruits of trees for use and for the market, and for
preserves and sweetmeats, and in raising vegetables and poultry, and
rearing sheep and horned cattle and horses. It was a beautiful and
simple horticulture, on a very large scale. Time was required to perfect
this garden--the Cubans call it paradise--of a cafetal; but when
matured, it was a cherished home. It required and admitted of no
extraordinary mechanical power, or of the application of steam, or of
science, beyond the knowledge of soils, of simple culture, and of plants
and trees.

For twenty years and more it has been forced upon the knowledge of the
reluctant Cubans, that Brazil, the West India islands to the southward
of Cuba, and the Spanish Main, can excel them in coffee-raising. The
successive disastrous hurricanes of 1843 and 1845, which destroyed many
and damaged most of the coffee estates, added to the colonial system of
the mother-country, which did not give extraordinary protection to this
product, are commonly said to have put an end to the coffee
plantations. Probably, they only hastened a change which must at some
time have come. But the same causes of soil and climate which made Cuba
inferior in coffee-growing, gave her a marked superiority in the
cultivation of sugar. The damaged plantations were not restored as
coffee estates, but were laid down to the sugar-cane; and gradually,
first in the western and northern parts, and daily extending easterly
and southerly over the entire is