rincipally after leaving Campinas that the scenery of the line is
really beautiful--wonderful undulating country--but with no habitations,
except, perhaps, a few miserable sheds miles and miles apart. At Nueva
Odena the Government is experimenting with Russian and Italian labourers,
for whom it has built a neat little colony. After a time each labourer
becomes the owner of the land he has cultivated. I am told that the
colony is a success.

CHAPTER II

Coffee--The Dumont Railway

MY object in travelling by the Paulista Railway was to inspect the line
on my way to the immense coffee plantations at Martinho Prado, owned by
Conselheiro Antonio Prado. The estate is situated at an elevation above
the sea level of 1,780 ft., upon fertile red soil. It is difficult,
without seeing them, to realize the extent and beauty of those coffee
groves--miles and miles of parallel lines of trees of a healthy, dark
green, shining foliage. A full-grown coffee tree, as everybody knows,
varies in height from 6 ft. to 14 or 15 ft. according to the variety, the
climate, and quality of the soil. It possesses a slender stem, straight
and polished, seldom larger than 3 to 5 in. in diameter, from which shoot
out horizontal or slightly oblique branches--the larger quite close to
the soil--which gradually diminish in length to its summit. The small
white blossom of the coffee tree is not unlike jessamine in shape and
also in odour. The fruit, green in its youth, gradually becomes of a
yellowish tint and then of a bright vermilion when quite ripe--except in
the Botucatu kind, which remains yellow to the end.

The fruit contains within a pericarp a pulp slightly viscous and sweet,
within which, covered by a membrane, are the two hemispherical coffee
beans placed face to face and each covered by a tender pellicle. It is
not unusual to find a single bean in the fruit, which then takes the
shape of an ellipsoid grooved in its longer axis--and this is called
_moka_ owing to the resemblance which it bears to the coffee of that
name.

The coffee chiefly cultivated in Brazil is the _Arabica_ L. and to a
small extent also the _Liberica_ Hiern, but other varieties have
developed from those, and there are crosses of local kinds such as the
Maragogype, which takes its name from the place where it was discovered
(Bahia Province). Those varieties are locally known as Creoulo, Bourbon,
Java, Botucatu (or yellow bean coffee), the Maragogype, and the