Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/214

206 I have considered well all the various enterprises, agricultural and industrial, possible in Mexico, and have come to the conclusion that, if one must come out here and labor,—if he feels a decided "call" to till the soil,—old Mother Earth will be about as generous to him in coffee culture as in anything. Whatever one embarks in, he must wait some years to see his money come back; if he choose the raising of cattle, he must wait for them to grow, for at least five years, and run the risk meanwhile of their dying or being stolen; and, besides, they can only increase in certain proportion; no cow can bear more than one or two calves a year, and no calf will grow any faster than he pleases, unless you stuff him full of expensive meal and grain. With corn, wheat, and barley, you must have hundreds of acres of land, must prepare it carefully, and hoe and weed or dress it several times during the season; and, after the crop is cut and stacked, your land is there again, barren and exposed as before, and you must go through the same process over again.

With coffee, you plant your land once, and that suffices for several years. Looking at it from my point of view,—the lazy man's outlook,—I can see nothing so inviting as coffee culture, unless it be a fat "living" in an English country church. In the first place, you buy your land, of which there is a fair supply yet to be had, at about ten dollars per acre. The soil here is mostly strong, clayey loam, with a heavy top deposit of vegetable mould, very rich and lasting. It is easily cleared, and, if not on a steep hillside, where the perpetual rains wash the humus away, retains its fertility a long while. After clearing, the plants, from six months to a year old, are set out in rows eight or ten feet wide, and about six feet apart in the row. Bananas or plantains should be set out in sufficient number to entirely shade the young plants; these are quick-growing, and produce great bunches of fruit the second year, so that a small income will be coming in from them before the coffee begins to bear. Corn and tobacco may be planted among the trees, if one is in a hurry to obtain returns from the land while his principal crop is growing; but it will be far better merely to