Men go through the Selvas and wherever they find a rubber-tree they cut notches in the tree trunk and fasten a cup underneath to catch the tree’s sap, which flows out from the notches like blood out of a cut finger. Then they go round again and empty the cups of rubber sap into a bucket and carry it to their camp. When they have collected enough sap they take a stick, pour some of the sap on it, and dry it over a fire. They do the same thing again and again until there is a big lump of rubber on the stick. These lumps of rubber they pile into canoes and carry down the Amazon River to larger boats that carry the rubber to the United States and to other countries.

But there is something that grows in Brazil that begins with a “C”—that almost every family in the United States has at breakfast each morning. Can you guess what it is? It’s coffee. Coffee doesn’t grow in Brazil wild as the rubber-tree does. In fact, coffee didn’t grow in Brazil at all until some men brought coffee bushes from across the ocean and planted them in Brazil. They planted them on high ground near the shore, not in the Selvas. They found that the high ground and the weather were just exactly right for growing coffee, and now much more coffee grows in Brazil than in the place where coffee came from first, and indeed more than in any other place

Coffee grows on a small tree, and the coffee berries look something like cherries. Inside of each cherry-like berry are two seeds. These seeds are coffee, but before coffee can be made into a drink the coffee seeds must be toasted brown and then ground to powder.

One New Year’s Day a long time ago a man was sailing along the coast of Brazil when he came to what seemed to be the mouth of a river. As it was the first day of January he named the place River of January, which in his language was Rio de Janeiro. It turned out to be no river; but the city that grew up at that place is still called Rio de Janeiro, and it is the capital of Brazil. In the harbor of Rio, as it is called for short, there is a huge rock which is called “The Loaf of Sugar,” and as you see Rio from a ship the mountains back of the city look like a “Sleeping Giant,” and that is what they are called.

More coffee is shipped from Rio than from any other place , except another place on the coast of Brazil just south of Rio. This other place is called Santos. The cup of coffee your father drinks in the morning probably comes from either Rio or Santos. If coffee and cocoa could talk, and tin cans and asphalt streets and rubber tires, as such things do in fairy-tales, what tales they could tell of their homes and travels!