etor, provided that he has his own capital
to work his estate, that he gives his own personal superintendence and
that he understands the management. These are the usual conditions of
success in most affairs; but a coffee-estate is not unfrequently abused
for not paying when it is worked with borrowed capital at a high rate
of interest under questionable superintendence.

It is a difficult thing to define the amount which constitutes a
"fortune:" that which is enough for one man is a pittance for another;
but one thing is certain, that, no matter how small his first capital,
the coffee-planter hopes to make his "fortune."

Now, even allowing a net profit of twenty per cent. per annum on the
capital invested, it must take at least ten years to add double the
amount to the first capital, allowing no increase to the spare capital
required for working the estate. A rapid fortune can never be made by
working a coffee estate. Years of patient industry and toil, chequered
by many disappointments, may eventually reward the proprietor; but it
will be at a time of life when a long residence in the tropics will
have given him a distaste for the chilly atmosphere of old England; his
early friends will have been scattered abroad, and he will meet few
faces to welcome him on his native shores. What cold is so severe as a
cold reception?--no thermometer can mark the degree. No fortune,
however large, can compensate for the loss of home, and friends, and
early associations.

This feeling is peculiarly strong throughout the British nation. You
cannot convince an English settler that he will be abroad for an
indefinite number of years; the idea would be equivalent to
transportation: he consoles himself with the hope that something will
turn up to alter the apparent certainty of his exile; and in this hope,
with his mind ever fixed upon his return, he does nothing for posterity
in the colony. He rarely even plants a fruit tree, hoping that his
stay will not allow him to gather from it. This accounts for the
poverty of the gardens and enclosures around the houses of the English
inhabitants, and the general dearth of any fruits worth eating.

How different is the appearance of French colonies, and how different
are the feelings of the settler! The word "adieu" once spoken, he sighs
an eternal farewell to the shores of "La belle France," and, with the
natural light-heartedness of the nation, he settles cheerfully in a
colony as his