The constant ventilation of a coffee store is of primary importance in checking any tendency to fermentation in the uncured beans; an ingenious planter has recently availed himself of this fact, and invented an apparatus which forces an unbroken current of dry, warm air, through the piles of damp coffee, thus continuing the curing process in the midst of the most rainy weather.
When a considerable portion of the gathering is completed, the manager has to see to his means of transport before his store is too crowded. A well conducted plantation will have its own cattle to assist in conveying the crop to Kandy; it will have roomy and dry cattle-pens, fields of guinea-grass, and pasture grounds attached, as well as a manure-pit, into which all refuse and the husks of the coffee are thrown, to be afterward turned to valuable account.
The carriage of coffee into Kandy is performed by pack-bullocks, and sometimes by the coolies, who carry it on their heads, but these latter can seldom be employed away from picking during the crop time. By either means, however, transport forms a serious item in the expenses of a good many estates. From some of the distant hill-estates possessing no cattle, and with indifferent jungle-paths, the conveyance of their crops to Kandy will often cost fully six shillings the hundred weight of clean coffee, equal to about three pence per mile. From Kandy to Colombo, by the common bullock-cart of the country, the cost will amount to about two or three shillings the clean hundred weight, in all, eight or nine shillings the hundred weight from the plantation to the port of shipment, being twice as much for conveying it less than a hundred miles, as it costs for freight to England, about sixteen thousand miles. One would imagine that it would not require much sagacity to discern that, in such a country as this, a railroad would be an incalculable benefit to the whole community. To make this apparent even to the meanest Cingalese capacity, we may mention that, even at the present time, transit is required from the interior of the island to its seaports, for enough coffee for shipment to Great Britain alone, to cause a railroad to be remunerative. The quantity of coffee imported from British possessions abroad in 1850, was upward of forty millions of pounds avoirdupois; and a very large proportion of this came from Ceylon. What additional quantities are required for the especially coffee-bibbing nations which lie between Ceylon and this country, surpass all present calculation; enough, we should think, sails away from this island in the course of every year, the transit of which to its sea-board, would pay for a regular net-work of railways.