Page:O que eu vi, o que nós veremos (1918).pdf/46

 he worked for ten years, at the end of which, because he was stricken with paralysis, he sold these "bushes", then transformed into about 5,000,000 coffee trees, served by a private railroad, built by him and connecting them to Ribeirão Preto.

Today, so that the memory of the value of this audacious man would not die in the memory of mankind, the British, in a significant tribute, have kept his name in the Company that currently owns that land.

In 1905, the Dumont Coffee Company harvested, in that coffee plantation, 498 thousand arrobas; in 1911, it obtained a gross income of 3,883 contos de réis!

One of our great statesmen, after a visit he made to my father, wrote in a travel impression, referring to that farm: "Everything is big there, everything is huge; there is only one modest thing: the house where the founder of all that lives".

I slept for three years and in July 1906 I presented myself at the Bagatelle field with my first airplane.