the amount on deposit has reached fifty dollars. To avoid in part the interruption of the frequent church holidays, a dispensation had been obtained from the ecclesiastical authorities, allowing work to go on, on most of them, as usual.
IV.
From Orizaba the next stage was to Cordoba. Cordoba is in the full tropics, and there I first made acquaintance with the coffee culture, the leading industry of the place. The plant is less striking in aspect than I had expected. It is a bush, with small, dark, glossy leaves, its stem never over six or seven inches in diameter, even at an age of fifty years. It is twelve feet high at most, but usually topped and kept lower for greater convenience in harvesting the product. It bears a little axillary white flower, fragrant like jasmine, and the green berries at the same time. A coffee plantation has not the breadth of the platanaras, the fields of towering bananas; but it needs shade, and large oaks are left distributed through it which accomplish this purpose. If left to the sun wholly it yields large crops at first, then dies. The coffee plant should bear after the fourth or fifth year, and yield a half-pound yearly for fifty or sixty years. It should have cost, up to the time of beginning to bear, about twenty-five cents. This is supposing a high cultivation. By the more shiftless method commonly found in use here it costs but half as much, but, on the other hand, yields no more than three ounces on an average.
Some few Americans, and other foreigners, have established themselves at Cordoba, and lead a dreamy existence in the shade. At one time it was the scene of an extensive coffee-planting by ex-Confederate generals, but these attempts were not successful. I was fortunate enough
