_The S. Paulo Coffee Industry._ Labourers’ houses; the coffee harvest; drying grounds; view of coffee plantation. ] When the round berries turn red harvesting begins. Men, women and children turn out, trained to strip the berries from the slender little branches without injuring the tree; the whole _fazenda_ is in a bustle, the water-channels are racing with scarlet berries carried along in the stream, and the machinery house is noisy. When the berries are pulped and the twin beans freed and cleaned, the business of packing begins; day by day wagon loads of sacks leave the _fazenda_ for São Paulo city, consigned to Santos, and thence to some country overseas. Brazilians appear to love _fazenda_ life; the wife of a coffee _fazendeiro_ will often take as keen and business-like an interest in the work as her husband does, discusses theories of planting with spirit, and will show you all the details of the new imported machinery. There is a true hospitality and geniality permeating the _fazenda_ in Brazil; very large sums are often made, and while quantities of coffee money have been royally wasted on extravagances, there is a class of strong business men in plantation work who put profits into improvements, follow new ideas, and build up their estates from year to year in an admirable manner. It is in São Paulo, and especially about Riberão Preto, Campinas, São Simão, S. Carlos, Dous Corregos, Botacatú,—all along the lines of the fans of railroad—that the great coffee estates are found. The original _Coffea Arabica_ has some naturalized children in Brazil of great merit and hardihood; the _Nacional_ or _Commun_, the delicate _Bourbon_, yellow _Botacatú_, the big aromatic _Maragogype_, all have their defenders. From these plantations come the hundreds of thousands of tons of coffee that have made Brazil the premier coffee country of the world, and brought her to this eminence in a remarkably short space of time. The development of coffee culture in Brazil, and the simultaneous development of public taste for its essence, is one of the great industrial stories of the nineteenth century. The interior of Rio State, with its endless series of little round hills crowned with coffee shrubs, is an assiduous producer; farther inland Minas Geraes substituted cotton with coffee when the United States began to sweep world markets with her product, but is now going back to cotton here and there as the demand of her own factories brings unheard-of prices for native fibres; she is however a regular supplier of coffee, in common with her neighbour Espirito Santo, and the more northerly state of Bahia. North of Bahia commercial production ceases, but, as in the case of cotton, shrubs may be seen all along the Brazilian littoral, up to Maranhão and Pará—of an African variety which does not need hilly country.