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A GLIMPSE OF RUBBER PLANTING 
Everywhere through the broad valleys and up the mountain sides 
could be seen cleared farms, in many cases fine plantation houses and 
great coffee estates. The native Costa Rican is perhaps one of the most 
enterprising and independent of all the Latin Americans. Nearly every 
man owns a patch of land and cultivates it. The better class speak 
English and are very friendly to Americans, welcoming them to their 
country with a manly, prideful air that is extremely taking. 
In the meantime the Ferrocarril Costa Rica was slowly but surely 
getting us up toward San Jose. The English locomotive was having a 
tough time of it with the steep grades, and it seemed every now and then 
as if the pull would be too much and that the heavy train would slip 
TEN MILES OUT OF PORT L1M0N. 
back down into the valley. The slow progress, however, gave us every 
opportunity to examine the track with its iron sleepers, to see where 
various great landslides had time after time wiped out the railroad and 
even dammed the swift flowing river; and to enjoy the wonderful semi- 
tropical luxuriance of the giant trees festooned with vines and studded 
with epiphytes: to look down into deep gorges, up the sides of steep 
mountains, and across broad and fertile valleys, so photographed the 
scenery in one's mind that the snail's pace of the train was not only 
not objected to, but was most welcome. At intervals all the way up were 
to be seen Castillo a trees, many of which had been tapped in the brutal 
native fashion, which amounts almost to girdling. At about fifteen 
