Prices, 1921—down to 7 m. bag; 1922 15816 m. In 1921 shipments were checked by the slump, and the Brazilian Government bought and held 4,500,000 bags. Prices, fallen to 7 milreis in 1921, recovered to over 15 milreis per 10 kilos in early 1922. Agricultural maps of Brazil, freely and courteously handed to any visitor at the Escriptorio do Informações do Brasil in the rue St. Honoré in Paris, show a huge patch of green in the middle of S. Paulo State and extending to a point very near the frontier of Minas Geraes. This patch represents some seven hundred and twenty-two million coffee trees, covering a total space of over two million acres. At least one hundred million pounds sterling is invested in coffee plantations, and, with an output of an average twelve million bags, income from crops is not less than twenty-five million pounds sterling a year. Advancing into the interior when the advent of railroads made cultivation of the sertão a commercial possibility, the culture of coffee in Brazil and especially in São Paulo is carried on upon a large scale: the plantations are great businesses, scientifically operated. The number of trees on a good estate is likely to run up into millions, although no other single grower rivals Colonel Schmidt’s production of eleven or twelve thousand tons of coffee. Visiting a fine _fazenda_ one is aware of seeing the inside of a commercial undertaking of striking magnitude, where activity is regularized, the whole life of the _fazendeiro_ and the _colonos_ subordinated to the supreme interest—at least during the rush season of the _colheita_. Looking from the windows of the _fazendeiro’s_ residence, which is generally upon a little eminence, one sees an ocean of dark green shrubs, planted in perfectly even lines, stretching away in unbroken symmetry as far as the eye can see. The São Paulo land chosen for coffee very often lies in long gentle slopes, its deep purple-carmine tint in sharp contrast to the glossy emerald coffee leaves, and down and up over the undulations run the rows, often extending for eight or ten kilometers. The storehouses, pulping machinery, and great cement drying grounds where the coffee is laid in the sun, are frequently in the hollow where the indispensable river runs; rows of neat little houses of labourers, the Italian _colonos_ who plant, cultivate and gather the coffee, stand within sight. In the background is the area of wild woodland, for “no fazenda can prosper unless it has a certain amount of _matto_,” say the Brazilians. In the flowering season a coffee estate is a lovely sight, the sturdy shrubs strewn so thickly with waxy white blossoms that it seems as if snow had fallen on them; the air is clean, cool and sunny, and bees hum over the sweet-scented flowers. The trees are larger than those seen in Central America, are unshaded, and generally three or four roots stand together to make the bush. The ground beneath the shrub is kept carefully weeded. [Illustration: