Some of the milk sticks in the cuts and becomes coagulated through exposure to the air. About a fortnight after a tree has been felled the congealed caucho is picked out of the wounds. It comes away in stringlike strips, which are wound into balls. Some of these caucho balls are very roughly made; others are put together in a most pleasing way--the narrow golden strips are prettily interlaced the while they are being wound into a compact, round bundle; in its finished state the ball looks as if it had been fashioned from strips of bamboo by the patient, skilful hands of a Japanese toymaker. [Illustration: _Malaysian Rubber Co._ NATIVE COAGULATING JELUTONG. _Page 41_] CHAPTER VIII DIFFERENT KINDS OF WILD RUBBER--_continued_ Beyond the Amazon Valley, the chief wild-rubber producing countries in the New World are Central America and Mexico. Both are homelands of the Castilloa, and Mexico has large areas of a rubber-giving shrub called “Guayule.” Now that you have seen how caucho is collected in South America, you will, I feel sure, be all the more interested to get a peep at some caucho-gatherers in Central America, who work in a different way. So let us go to Nicaragua. Once more we are standing in the maze of a tropical forest. Just in front of us is a tree, which has big leaves hanging independently of each other from either side of the branches. By the shape and arrangement of its foliage we recognize it as a Castilloa. Under this tree stands a semi-clad, brown figure. What a dwarf he looks! No wonder; the tree with whose height you are unconsciously comparing his stature is a giant, whose top-to-root measure is well over 100 feet. The native is going to collect caucho-milk. He does not cut down the tree, but taps it as it stands. With a big knife he makes V-shaped cuts in the trunk, operating on the lower part from the ground, and on the upper part from a hanging ladder. This rough-looking climbing apparatus he has made for himself out of bush-rope. You can see for yourself that it is easy enough for him to find bush-rope in this forest; from the branches of numbers of the trees around hang lengths of naturally-corded fibre, some of it stringlike, much of it thicker than any rope that is ever made in a factory. The caucho-milk runs out from the cuts and trickles down the trunk into a calabash. When the collector has tapped several trees, he puts all the milk into an old pan, and adds to it some watery juice which he has obtained from a particular variety of creeper. He then stirs the mixture, and in a little time the rubber coagulates into lumps, which float on the surface. He takes these pieces of rubber out of the pan, and kneads them into flat, round “biscuits.”