But in the mornings and the evenings, when the air is cool, Limon is a busy place. Dwarfish engines with long trains of cars wind down from the interior, laden with coffee and bananas. Half-naked roustabouts file back and forth across the gangplanks, loading steamers for Liverpool, New York, and New Orleans. The coffee is allowed to accumulate in the warehouses until the vessels come, but the bananas must not be picked till the last moment, at telegraphic notice, the morning the steamer sails. Trains of cars are sent to the side-tracks of every plantation, and are loaded with the half-ripe fruit still glistening with the dew. There are often as many as fifty thousand bunches on a single steamer, representing six million bananas, but they are so perishable that more than half the cargo goes overboard before its destination is reached. The shipments of bananas from Costa Rica are something new in trade. Only a few years since all our supply came from Honduras and the West Indies, but the development of the plantations around Limon has given that port almost a monopoly. This is due to the construction of a railway seventy miles into the interior, intended to connect the capital of the country and its populous valley with the Atlantic Ocean. The road was begun by the Government, but before its completion passed into the hands of Minor C. Keith, of Brooklyn, who has a perpetual lease, and is attempting to extend it to San José, from and to which freight is transported in ox-carts, a distance of thirty miles. [Illustration: RUBBER-TREES.] Along the track many plantations have been opened in the jungle, and produce prolifically. Numbers of the settlers are from the United States, from the South particularly, and it being the fashion to christen the plantations, the traveller finds over the entrances sign-boards that bear familiar names. Over the gate-way to one of the finest haciendas, as they are called, is the inscription “Johnny Reb’s Last Ditch,” a forlorn and almost hopeless ex-Confederate having drifted there, after much buffeting by fortune, and taken up Government land, on which he now is in a fair way to make a fortune.