Denunciations of the “truck” system, and the prices charged to the rubber collector are common; but the supplier of foodstuffs, etc. (the _aviador_) himself takes long risks and is bound to insure himself against them. His customer (_aviado_) may become ill and unable to work; he may die; he may, if he can elude the river guards and traverse the steaming interior forests, run away, although in these regions where the river is the only highway, this does not often happen. Also the price of rubber may drop—rubber has been a business so speculative that it has become a gamble in which the _aviador_, himself caught in a deeply-rooted system, takes long odds. He makes money nearly always, and the ownership of much of the great areas of Amazonian rubber forest has passed into his hands, but he is scarcely to be blamed for securing his profits in the manner decreed by the system; to change the industrial routine would be to effect a revolution upon the Amazon. The approach of the dry season upon the Amazon heralds the incoming from other northern regions, generally Ceará, of a host of workers. Anyone who has travelled on the steamers going up the river at the beginning of the rubber season has looked down upon the deck where throngs of people are herded together, their hammocks slung in tiers one above the other; at times of drought whole families come out from the “_distritos flagellados_,” and men, women and children are crowded in an intimacy which would be more trying than it is were it not for the apparently unfailing good-nature and mutual courtesy of these northern peasants. Much of their simple cooking, washing, and toilet changes are perforce unsheltered; gentle, easily amused, they never seem to complain, but, playing their inevitable guitars and singing their _modinhas_, they watch the yellow flood of the great river, bordered with the line of distant forest, so vast that ideas of size are lost in its sweeping monotony. Arrived at Manáos the collector goes to the store of the _aviador_, gets his outfit of tools—cups for collecting latex, big knife (machado), little axe, bucket, and metal cone for smoke-regulation in the coagulating process—as well as food and such clothes as he may need, possibly adding a gun, and when the cost of his lodging has been added to the bill, he may set out in one of the _gaiolas_ that ascend the upper rivers, en route to the _seringal_ where he has arranged to work. An average _seringal_ contains fifty _estradas_; to each _seringueiro_ (collector), two _estradas_ are allotted, tapped on alternate days and each _estrada_ (literally road or walk) contains, in a good _seringal_, an average of seventy to one hundred and twenty trees. Before the _seringueiro_ does a stroke of work there has been a heavy outlay by the owner (_patrão_) of the estate for its preparation. Forestal opening is done by the _matteiro_, the expert forester whose work is probably