largest and ripest grains are put aside and reserved for the use of the fazendeiro. Three or four years of storage give them a strength and aroma of which Europeans have no idea. The chief occupation of the negroes between seedtime and harvest is weeding the plantations. One must have lived in the tropics to form any conception of the rapidity and strength of growth which vegetation acquires there in the rainy season, when water, sunshine, and electricity are everywhere in profusion. Sugar, coffee, and cotton would be quickly choked by weeds (capim) if the latter were not at ones destroyed.
Coffee-culture exhausts the soil. Fields that have been used as a coffee plantation for twenty or thirty years are rendered entirely useless for the purposes of agriculture. It is necessary to seek a soil into which another primeval forest has drawn the elements of vegetation from the bowels of the earth. I have seen old coffee-plantations which had been abandoned, according to the inhabitants, for many years. Nothing was visible to the eye but hills with barren summits, with scarcely a trace of vegetation—a strange phenomenon in a country where sap seems to start from stone itself. The rains, unchecked by any obstacle, had carried away the arable soil and left the rocks bare. The valleys, it is true, profited by this detritus. There vegetation, finding a barrier to retain moisture, grows up rapidly, gradually gains the foot of the hill, and gives indications of some day reconquering it. Thus, in a long succession of ages, have been formed and are still forming the forests that cover the granite mountains.
SUGAR-PLANTATIONS.
The sugar plantations are more easily recognizable than those devoted to the coffee-culture; they resemble to a deceptive degree large fields of reeds. The size of the cane varies according to the altitude of the ground, or rather according to the quantity of water and sunlight it receives. I have often seen, on the plateaux of the interior, what the natives call manaco cane, or monkey cane. This is the indigenous cane, and it generally appeared to me about the size of an ordinary reed; though some species, in the low, moist regions, attained gigantic proportions. The mode of culture varies according to locality. In some places cuttings are made annually on the same fields for several years in succession, while in others only one or two are practised.
SUGAR MAKING.
The manufacture of sugar is too well known for me to enter into long details on the subject. When the canes are cut, they are immediately taken to the mill and crushed. The juice, of a greenish color, is conducted through a gutter into a series of boilers, where it is gradually concentrated. The people of the country attribute to this liquor a host of curative properties, and regale themselves with it freely. The blacks especially make large use of it, but they find it most convenient to tear the cane with their teeth. The liquor thus obtained has a fresh sugary savor, while the juice that comes from the mill, containing all the moisture of the stalk, leaves in the mouth an herbaceous after-taste. A few pints of lye from the ashes of certain plants rich in potash carry off the greater part of these matters, and the rest is afterwards eliminated by clarification.
When the action of the fire begins to manifest itself, a slave stationed before the last boiler carefully watches the color of the liquor and the different degrees of consistence. Long practice serves him instead of an aērometer. When the juice has turned to syrup, he takes it out and pours it into tubs where it is cooled. The sugar is made; it first appears in little reddish grains. Nothing further remains but to clarify and dry it. The residue of the liquor, called melasse or molasses, affords by distillation the liquor called cachaça, that nec-
