Page:Brazilian short stories.djvu/47



No worse farm existed than that of Espigão. It had already ruined three owners, which made superstitious people say: "The thing's a white elephant!" The last holder, a certain David Moreira de Souza, acquired it at auction, convinced that it was a great bargain; but there he was, too, head over ears in debt, scratching his head disconsolately. …

The coffee plantations stripped every other year, lashed by hail or blackened by frost, never yielded enough of a crop to fill a deposit.

The overgrown pastures were full of white-ant heaps intertwined with choking weeds, teeming with ticks; any ox turned loose there soon became thin, with its ribs showing, full of parasites, pitifully sorry and sore.

The underbrush that had taken the place of the native forest, revealed by the indiscreet presence of the brambles, the poorest kind of dry soil. On such soil the manioc shyly put forth little knotted branches; the large species of sugar-cane took on the aspect of the most slender kind and these in turn became similar to little bamboos that passed through the grinding cylinders untouched.

The horses were full of lice. The pigs that escaped the plague never got beyond the Pharaonic thinness of Egyptian cows.

On every side the cutting-ant reigned su-