cao grown in the mainland African colonies, though the
German Government offers special inducements in the Kameruns; no
British African colony grows it to any extent. Fernando Po sends
supplies to Spain, and occasionally on the London market strange
packages made of rough cowhide stitched with leather thongs are seen,
containing beans from Madagascar.

[Illustration--Drawing: MAP OF S. THOME.]

[Illustration--Black and White Plate: Ceylon: Carting Cacao to Rail.]

[Illustration--Drawing: MAP OF CEYLON.]

Further east are the plantations of Ceylon. In the hill districts, of
which Matale is the centre, are many estates, some in joint
cultivation of tea and cocoa. The output from this colony is at the
present time nearly stationary. The Dutch East Indian produce is
almost exclusively shipped to Amsterdam.

[Illustration--Drawing: MAP OF SAMOA.]

In the preceding pages extracts have frequently been culled from
writers of the past: in the literature of the present day Charles
Kingsley's graphic account of Trinidad and its cacao and sugar
plantations in "At Last" should be read _in extenso_. Another very
interesting episode of modern date is the introduction of the cacao
into the Samoan Islands in the Pacific by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Writing to Sidney Colvin, on December 7, 1891, in one of his "Vailima
Letters," he says:

"When I was filling baskets all Saturday, in my dull, mulish
way, perhaps the slowest worker there, surely the most
particular, and the only one that never looked up or knocked
off, I could not but think I should have been sent on
exhibition as an example to young literary men. 'Here is how to
learn to write' might be the motto. You should have seen us;
the veranda was like an Irish bog, our hands and faces were
bedaubed with soil, and Faauma was supposed to have struck the
right note when she remarked (_a propos_ of nothing), 'Too much
_eleele_ (soil) for me.' The cacao, you must understand, has to
be planted at first in baskets of plaited cocoa-leaf.[22] From
four to ten natives were plaiting these in the wood-shed. Four
boys were digging up soil and bringing it by the boxful to the
veranda. Lloyd and I and Belle, and sometimes S. (who came to
bear a hand), were filling the baskets, removing stones and
lumps of clay; Austin and Faauma carried them when full to
Fanny, who planted a seed in each, and then set them