At harvesting time thousands of pickers flock to the coffee regions from other parts of Brazil, as they are able to earn good wages for a few weeks. Many whole families will travel for days on foot, when they have not enough money to pay their railroad fares. There is often considerable rivalry among the pickers to see who can pick the most; but there is also the further incentive to rapid work in the fact that all wages are paid at so much for a fixed quantity. Fifty pounds is considered a good day’s picking when it is done from the trees. The method in general operation on the large _fazendas_ is to strip the branches of all their coffee berries, by pulling them between the fingers, and then others follow up and pick up the berries, leaves, etc., from the ground, or the sheets which have been spread out to catch them. In this way only one picking is made even though some of the berries have become overripe, and others are green owing to the uneven ripening. This causes a considerable unavoidable loss. In an extraordinary season a tree may produce as much as seven pounds of coffee, but a fair average is three pounds per tree. [Illustration: DRYING COFFEE.] The gathering and preparation of the berries is a difficult and laborious operation involving a number of processes. The large plantations are equipped with all the necessary paved yards and machinery for this work, and the smaller planters send theirs to central factories, or _beneficios_, as they are called. The coffee must be washed, pulped, dried and submitted to several stages of preparation. The washing is a simple process, but the work of drying requires the greatest care, for it exercises a great influence on the value of the coffee. There are at least two distinct processes in the preparation of the coffee, but it is always first washed and then soaked in order to soften the pulp, so that it can be removed, for the coffee beans are in the centre. This “pulping” is done by a revolving cylinder set with teeth, after which the beans are run into tanks for a thorough washing to remove all traces of the pulp. Some have a series of these tanks through which the coffee is passed, and the beans are then carried by means of running water out through the paving yards. On these great yards of beaten earth, paved with bricks or cemented, and sometimes tarred (for they dry quicker on a tarred floor), the berries are spread out in thin layers to dry. If you would take up a handful at this time you would find they were covered with a soft gummy substance. No artificial drying process equals that of the sun’s rays. Men with wooden rakes, and in their bare feet, are kept constantly busy turning over the berries to hasten this process, which oftentimes requires many days, and even weeks, for it is necessary that they be evenly dried.