The city, seen from a distance, with its background of forests and rows of white-walled, red-roofed houses, separated into clusters by the parks and tree-lined avenues sloping down to the shores of its own spacious bay, has the gay, holiday appearance of a summer resort. Only a closer view dispels the illusion, for its harbor is filled with vessels of every size and description, from the little _monatrias_, or canoes, of the Indians, to the great liners of the Brazilian Lloyd. Its compact business section in the vicinity of the quay, the Custom House and market and the warehouses of the steamship companies present a commercial aspect substantial and busy enough to command the respect even of a Chicagoan or New Yorker. As already stated, more than three fifths of the rubber supply of the world comes from Brazil, and two of these three fifths pass this very port, to say nothing of the cacao, nuts, oils, tobacco, woods, and other things shipped there, or of the importations. One of the features of a stay in Belém, by the way—that is, for any one interested in seeing how the first crude form of an article so familiar in its finished forms is produced, is a trip to one of the near-by rubber estates. It has not yet been necessary in this section, if anywhere in Brazil, to resort to cultivation to any great extent, and so the huts of the _seringueiros_ (gatherers) are located right in the woods, where the rubber trees grow promiscuously among the others, and each _seringueiro_ is allotted as many as he can attend to. The sap, which resembles milk in color and consistency, is collected in cups placed under incisions in the bark, then brought into camp in bucketfuls and reduced by a primitive process of evaporation to the slabs or cakes forming the raw article of commerce. One does not have to leave Belém itself, however, to see rubber trees and most of the other species, too, for there the people have been generous enough to preserve within the city limits a large tract of primeval forest, which has been cleared of underbrush and converted into a park, known as the _Bosque Municipal_. Also there is a wonderful botanical garden and a museum where the rarest specimens of the vegetation, and animals and the birds and reptiles of the country are assembled.