[PARA RUBBER AND ITS GATHERING.]
Rubber is collected by the natives in Brazil, who gather the thick, creamlike sap which oozes from the hatchet-cut in the bark of the rubber-trees. It is received in tiny cups of clay or tin, several of which are emptied daily into pots and carried where the sap is coagulated and "cured." The flow of sap from each tapping lasts but a few hours, and the tree must be bled in fresh places daily.
The total yield from the most vigorous tree does not exceed three or four pints in a season, and a considerable percentage of this is lost by evaporation.
In the camps the Para rubber sap is coagulated over a fire of Uricuri palm-nuts, built under an earthen pot, something like a slender-necked jug without a bottom. A paddle is dipped into the thick sap, and then, holding it in thick smoke, it is deftly turned in the operator's hands until a thin layer of rubber is formed. An hour's work at this would produce a lump, the foundation of a biscuit weighing five or six pounds. When the biscuit has reached a weight of twenty-five pounds or more, it is slit open, the paddle removed, and the rubber hung up to dry. Rubber thus gathered and cured is the finest known.
From the forest the rubber is sent down the stream on crude boats, later being placed on the steamers which ply the Amazon. When Manaos, the second largest city in the Amazon country, is reached, the rubber is boxed, though this is often left until its arrival at Para, at the mouth of the Amazon River. Manaos is 1,200 miles from the sea, so that considerable time is consumed in bringing the rubber to its shipping-point to foreign lands. At Para it is placed in the ocean liners destined for New York or some of the European countries.
[QUEER CALIFORNIAN TRADERS.]
The queerest "traders" in all vast California are the odd little animals known as "trade rats."
They never steal, but give miscellaneous articles in exchange for what they take.
A paste-pot left overnight in an assay office was found in the morning filled with the oddest collection of rubbish.