[Illustration: CHOCOLATE IN THE ROUGH.] The coffee plantations, or _quintas_, as they are called, extend from the coast far up into the mountains, and are very prolific. The people here claim to raise the best coffee in the world; and it is a singular fact asserted by the exporters that only the poorer grades go to the United States, while all of the better quality is sent to France and Germany. Just why this is so no one explains, further than repeating the remark so often made that the Americans do not like good coffee. [Illustration: SEPARATING THE COCOA-BEANS.] Another curious fact is that chocolate costs more here than it does in New York--here where it is grown and manufactured, for very little of the genuine article is sold in our market. When the cocoa-beans are thoroughly dried in the sun they are shipped in gunny sacks to market, where the chocolate manufacturer gets hold of them. He grinds them into a fine powder of a gray color that looks like Graham flour, mixes it with the pure juice of the sugar-cane, called _papillon_, and flavors the mixture with the juice of the vanilla-bean. After being boiled for a certain length of time, this is poured into moulds and allowed to harden, when it becomes the chocolate of commerce. The Caracas chocolate, as all the product of Venezuela is termed, is considered the best in the world. It costs sixty-five cents per pound at the factories there, but can be purchased for forty-five or fifty cents a pound in New York. The best cocoa-beans are forty cents a pound here, but the Yankee manufacturer has a way of increasing their weight and reducing their value by adulteration. Pipe-clay is cheap and heavy, and it is supposed to be harmless. It weighs five times as much as cocoa, and as the profit in lager-beer is in the foam, so is the profit in chocolate in the pipe-clay, or whatever substance it may be mixed with. Puerto Cabello and Maracaibo are the two great exporting markets of Venezuela, from which the greater part of the coffee and chocolate is shipped. The former place is famous for being one of the most unhealthful in the world, and the bay upon which it is situated is called Golfe Triste (the gulf of tears), because of the terrible scourges which are born in its miasmas. The bottom of the bay is said to be literally covered with the bones of those who have been heaved overboard for the lack of a better place to bury them. The ghost of that most famous of all freebooters, Sir Francis Drake, haunts the place, for he died here of yellow-fever, and his body lies in a leaden coffin thirty fathoms deep in the sea. The place is called Puerto Cabello (the port of the hair), on the pretence that ships are so safe in its harbors that they might be tied to their moorings with a single hair. This is something of an exaggeration, but nevertheless the harbor is the best on the Spanish Main, and has such abrupt banks that a vessel can be run up against the shore anywhere to take her cargo.