Does not rain, the harvest is
small; and the failure of rain is so common a circumstance that we must
leave the cultivation of coffee to the people of St. Domingo and Brazil."
I asked if the plantation could not be converted into a sugar estate.
"Not this," he answered; "it has been cultivated too long. The land was
originally rich, but it is exhausted" - tired out, was the expression he
used - "we may cultivate maize or rice, for the dry culture of rice
succeeds well here, or we may abandon it to grazing. At present we keep a
few negroes here, just to gather the berries which ripen, without taking
any trouble to preserve the plants, or replace those which die."
I could easily believe from what I saw on this estate, that there must be
a great deal of beauty of vegetation in a well-kept coffee plantation, but
the formal pattern in which it is disposed, the straight alleys and rows
of trees, the squares and parallelograms, showed me that there was no
beauty of arrangement. We fell in, before we returned to our inn, with the
proprietor, a delicate-looking person, with thin white hands, who had been
educated at Boston, and spoke English as if he had never lived anywhere
else.
