Fruit of many acceptable varieties can be grown to perfection with little labour in immense quantities. Coffee is one of the most prolific of crops. Timber is obtainable in magnificent assortment and unrealisable quantities. Poultry and pigs multiply extraordinarily. Apart from bananas the fruit trade is shifty and treacherous. The markets are far away and inconstant, the means of transport not yet perfect. Many assert that not half the pine-apples and oranges, and not one-hundredth part of the mangoes produced in North Queensland are consumed. That the quantity grown is trivial in comparison with what would be, were the demand regular and consistent, is self-evident. We want population to eat our produce, and then there will be no complaint. In the case of coffee a plentiful supply of cheap labour is essential to success. Those who by judicious treatment of the aboriginals command their services have so far made profit. A coffee plantation suggests pleasant, picturesque and spicy things. The orderly lines of the plants, in glossy green adorned for a brief space with white, frail, fugitive flowers distilling a deliciously sweet and grateful odour, the branches crowded with gleaming berries, green, pink and red, present pleasing aspect. As a change to the scenery of the jungle, a coffee estate has a garden-like relief. But picking berry by berry is slow and monotonous work, vexatious, too, to those mortals whose skin is sensitive to the attacks of green ants. Then comes the various processes of the removal of the pulp, first by machinery, finally by the fermentation of the still adhering slimy residuum; then the drying and saving by exposure to the sun on trays or on tarpaulins until all moisture is expelled; and the hulling which disintegrates the parchment from the twin berries; then winnowing, and finally the polishing. Do drinkers of the fragrant and exhilarating beverage realise the amount of labour and care involved before the crop is taken off and preserved from deterioration and decay? A few berries that may have become mildewed during the slow, tedious and anxious process of drying in the sun, may violate the delicate flavour and aroma which the grower has been at pains to secure and fix. In coffee it is as with many other features of rural life in Australia. The men who undertake the production are for the most part those who have gained their knowledge by personal experience on the spot. Reading and the advice of experts who have graduated in countries where climatic conditions are diverse and where the labour is cheap, yet skilled by reason of generation after generation of occupation in it, do not complete necessary knowledge. Problems have to be faced that have no theoretical nor official solution, and blunders paid for, until by the process of the elimination of mistakes the right way is discovered. Losses mount up until either patience and means are exhausted, or success crowns the application of intelligent enterprise.