The custom of coffee drinking is relatively of rather recent development among peoples of Europe and their descendants in America. For some reason, for a long time after it made its way west from Arabia and Turkey, it was under the ban of the church. Maybe this was because of its Mohammedan origin. It was not until 1652 that the first house that made a specialty of serving coffee was opened in London, and about the same time it was introduced in France. From then on it has spread until the amount now consumed the world over is simply enormous, especially in the United States, where we take somewhere near half of all that is grown. At first it came only from northern Africa, Arabia, and Turkey; then the Dutch began experimenting and succeeded in cultivating it in Java, and the French in the West Indies. For a while these were the principal sources of supply. The story goes that in 1760 a Portuguese, João Alberto Castello Branco, planted a bush in Rio, and from that small start, thanks to her peculiarly favorable soil and climate, Brazil soon outstripped the others and took the lead. And it is in these uplands of the State of São Paulo that more than half of all of this enormous amount of coffee that is consumed in the world to-day is produced. There are between fifteen and twenty thousand cafezals, or plantations, employing hundreds of thousands of laborers, and some of the plantations are so vast that they grow millions of trees. Here it is that most of the immigrants flock. There is a million of Italians alone. [Illustration: COFFEE PLANTATION, BRAZIL.]