362 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



Tierra Blanca. "Coffee" was accompanied by tortillas or 

 small white bread loaves. Breakfast consisted of soup, 

 beef, rice, frijoles (black beans) and potatoes, with coffee at 

 the end. Dinner was almost the same as breakfast. Young 

 pig sometimes replaced beef, and chayotes appeared in one 

 form or another at some meals. 



In December, when we were here again, the front room 

 of the Alfaro house, where we had our meals as before, had 

 a new case with a glass front, containing some new saints. 

 On the ground just behind the house the family supply of 

 coffee was drying. Under the veranda in front stood a sec- 

 tion of a tree-trunk about two feet in diameter and two to 

 three feet long. One end was hollowed out to form a bowl. 

 It served as a mortar in which the dried coffee berries were 

 pounded with a heavy wooden cylinder, narrowed in the 

 middle, to break open the husks and release the two coffee 

 grains within each berry. Three large pigs, which I do not 

 remember seeing on our previous visit, occasionally passed 

 through the house from front to back doors. Almost every 

 member of the family — the only exception I am sure of was 

 the baby about a year and a half old — smoked a cigarette 

 occasionally, even little girls of five or six. The only really 

 serious objection to the family habit was that they spat 

 anywhere on the beaten earth floors of the house. Had we 

 been obliged to sleep there instead of in the clubhouse, we 

 might have been less comfortable. I must not omit the 

 mention of a hand-run sewing machine and a neat white 

 tablecloth of familiar appearance. The meat now was 

 dried and mostly tough; several pieces of the dried article 

 hung from a cord stretched across the kitchen. We had 

 wheaten bread, baked in San Jose and bought in a local 

 store, served to us with coffee instead of tortillas, more fre- 

 quently than on our former visit, which may indicate a 

 change in the habits of life. We still had tortillas at break- 



