CHAPTER II 
Coffee — The Dumont Railway 
M Y object in travelling by the Paulista Railway was 
to inspect the line on my way to the immense 
coffee plantations at Martinho Prado, owned by 
Conselheiro Antonio Prado. The estate is situated at an 
elevation of 1,780 feet above the sea level, upon fertile 
red soil. It is difficult, without seeing them, to realize 
the extent and beauty of those coffee groves: miles and 
miles of parallel lines of trees of a healthy, dark green, 
shining foliage. A full-grown coffee tree, as everybody 
knows, varies in height from six feet to fourteen or fifteen 
feet according to the variety, the climate, and quality of 
the soil. It possesses a slender stem, straight and 
polished, seldom larger than three to five inches in diam¬ 
eter, from which shoot out horizontal or slightly oblique 
branches — the larger quite close to the soil —which 
gradually diminish in length to its summit. The small, 
white blossom of the coffee tree is not unlike jessamine 
in shape arid also in odour. The fruit, green in its youth, 
gradually becomes of a yellowish tint and then a bright 
vermilion when quite ripe — except in the Botucatu kind, 
which remains yellow to the end. 
The fruit contains within a pericarp a pulp slightly 
viscous and sweet, within which, covered by a membrane, 
are the two hemispherical coffee beans placed face to face 
and each covered by a tender pellicle. It is not unusual 
to find a single bean in the fruit, which then takes the 
shape of an ellipsoid grooved in its longer axis; and this 
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