The quality of Haytian coffee is excellent, but its price in the market is low, from various causes. Sometimes the crop is gathered hastily, and ripe and unripe seeds are mixed; and then it is dried on the bare ground, regardless of the state of the weather; and when swept up into heaps, it is too often intermingled with small stones, leaves, and dirt; and fraudulent cultivators or middle-men add other substances to increase the weight. I have known carefully-selected parcels sent to France marked Mocha, and there realising full prices. Nowhere is coffee made better than in Hayti; it is roasted to a rich brown, ground and prepared with a sufficient allowance of the material, all on the same day, and the result is perfect. As with other crops in the world, there are good years and bad years; but with neglected plants, the bad come oftener than they would if due attention were paid to their cultivation. In 1789, when the French possessed the island, the amount produced greatly exceeded anything seen since, with the exceptions of 1863, 1875, and 1876. In those years above 71,000,000 lbs. passed through the custom-house, and it is calculated that about 15,000,000 lbs. were smuggled. The variations have been as follows:-- Lbs. 1789 88,360,502 1818 20,280,589 1824 46,000,000 1835 48,352,371 1845 41,002,571 1860 60,514,289 1861 45,660,889 1863 71,712,345 1864 45,168,764 1873 64,786,690 1874 54,677,854 1875 72,637,716 1876 72,289,504 1877 52,991,861 1878 63,255,545 1879 47,941,506 1880 55,562,897 This striking increase in the amount of coffee produced since the great war would appear somewhat to contradict the theory of the degeneracy and idleness of the Haytians, but it must be remembered that the women and children are very hard-working; that the women are in a majority, and that the work is mostly done by Nature; the men, also, are not very light-handed taskmasters. If a space be cleared round the bushes with a _mauchette_--easy work that a child can do--the increase in a plantation will continue, as I have remarked, by the beneficent hand of Nature; the heavy rains knock off the ripe berries and scatter them down the mountain-sides, and give rise to those matted undergrowths of coffee-bushes whose fecundity often surprises the traveller. It is not likely that the produce of the coffee-plants will decrease.