begins a new plantation, completely abandoning his old one, without a thought of redeeming or fertilizing the exhausted land. One of the long-sighted reforms undertaken by our host is the manuring of all the old, deserted plantations on his estate; he has already a number of vigorous young plantations, which promise to be as good as if a virgin forest had been sacrificed to produce them. He wishes not only to preserve the wood on his own estate, and to show that agriculture need not be cultivated at the expense of taste and beauty, but to remind his country people also, that, extensive as are the forests, they will not last forever, and that it will be necessary to emigrate before long to find new coffee grounds, if the old ones are to be considered worthless. Another of his reforms is that of the roads, already alluded to. The ordinary roads in the coffee plantations, like the mule-tracks all over the country, are carried straight up the sides of the hills between the lines of shrubs, gullied by every rain, and offering, besides, so steep an ascent that even with eight or ten oxen it is often impossible to drive the clumsy, old-fashioned carts up the slope, and the negroes are obliged to bring a great part of the harvest down on their heads. An American, who has been a great deal on the coffee fazendas in this region, told me that he had seen negroes bringing enormous burdens of this kind on their heads down almost vertical slopes. On Senhor Lage’s estate all these old roads are abandoned, except where they are planted here and there with alleys of orange-trees for the use of the negroes, and he has substituted for them winding roads in the side of the hill with a very gradual ascent, so that light carts dragged by a single mule can transport all the harvest from the summit of the plantation to the drying-ground. It was the harvesting season, and the spectacle was a pretty one. The negroes, men and women, were scattered about the plantations with broad, shallow trays, made of plaited grass or bamboo, strapped over their shoulders and supported at their waists; into these they were gathering the coffee, some of the berries being brilliantly red, some already beginning to dry and turn brown, while here and there was a green one not yet quite ripe, but soon to ripen in the scorching sun. Little black children were sitting on the ground and gathering what fell under the bushes, singing at their work a monotonous but rather pretty snatch of song in which some took the first and others the second, making a not inharmonious music. As their baskets were filled they came to the Administrador to receive a little metal ticket on which the amount of their work was marked. A task is allotted to each one,—so much to a full-grown man, so much to a woman with young children, so much to a child,—and each one is paid for whatever he may do over and above it. The requisition is a very moderate one, so that the