price and quality between the Vevey Fins—
which have lately superseded Pickwicks—and
the best produce of Havannah. The great
value of tobacco is very striking in contrast with
the smallness of its bulk. Yonder stands a
hogshead of Virginia. The staves of the hogshead
have been removed, and the tobacco stands
on end, a solid black block. The value of that
little mound of leaves is fifty pounds; the duty
paid to government one hundred and fifty
pounds, or exactly three times the value. From
this cellar the leaves of various kinds, after
being assorted, are carried up into the
manufacturing room.

I was not prepared for the extraordinary sight
which burst upon me in this department. The
cellar was the dark front scene of the pantomime;
this was the grand transformation. It
was not a room, but an immense hall, in which,
at regularly arranged benches, sat upwards of
four hundred girls. The gleam of fair faces
that fell upon me, like a sudden flash of
sunlight, as I entered the hall, quite startled me,
and it was a minute or two before I quite
recovered my self-possession. There was not a
male worker to be seen. They were all girls,
the majority of them very young, and every one
of them held at that moment a handful of
tobacco leaf, which she was rolling up into a
cigar. Four hundred and odd cigars would be
made in a twinkling. It was a busy scene.
Girls, girls everywhere, all neat and tidy and
cheerful, many of them exceedingly pretty. The
effect of these four thousand white fingers nimbly
plying their task was like that of a dancing
light—like the sunlight glinting through rustling
leaves. The hundreds upon hundreds of
fair faces dotted at regular intervals over the
vast area of the hall, brought to my mind the
garden of Contrairy Mary, which was laid out,
as you may remember,

With silver bells and cockle shells,
And pretty girls all of a row.

I shall have something to tell about these
pretty girls presently. In the mean time let us
follow the process of manufacturing a cigar. The
assorted leaves are brought up from the cellar
to this long bench at the end of the hall. There
are leaves of all kinds and qualities for cigars
of every denomination. The duty of the girls
at this bench is to strip the leaves from the
centre stalk. The stalks are thrown into a
heap to be ground into snuff, and the leaves are
made up into little bundles to be distributed
among the cigar-makers at the various benches.
Each bundle contains a quantity of leaf sufficient
to make a pound of cigars. Let us follow one
of these bundles to desk number one, girl
number one. She is a maker of, we will say,
Regalias, of which there should be a hundred
to the pound. Her tools consist of a square
cutting board, a sharp knife like that used by
shoemakers, a pair of scales, and a little pot of
gum. She has at her elbow a heap of broken
leaves, and a heap of perfect leaves. Practice
enables her to know exactly how much of the
broken leaf to take up for the padding of the
cigar. Seeing it in her hand, you would think
it was a great deal too much. But in an instant,
the shapeless mass is enveloped in a strip of
smooth leaf, rolled round and round, obliquely
towards the top, fastened there with a light
touch of gum, and then nothing remains but to
place the cigar against an upright ledge on the
board and cut off the end fair and square. It
seems a very simple and easy operation; but
try your hand at it, and see what a shapeless
bundle you will turn out! Cigar-making
is not learned in a week, nor in a month, nor
yet in a year. Your soul is no doubt often
fretted by a cigar that won't "draw." ln all
probability that cigar has been made by an
apprentice. It is not so easy a matter to make
exactly a hundred cigars out of a given quantity
of leaf. If there be less than a hundred, it is
certain that some of them have been rolled up
too tight; if more than a hundred, that some
are too loose. Each girl on completing her
pound of cigars takes them to a table in the
centre of the hall to be inspected. Here they
are weighed and counted (by girls), and, if
satisfactory, are passed and noted to the maker's
credit; but if there should be one too many, or
one too few, to the pound, the girl has to take
them back to her desk and rectify them.

Each bench is devoted to the manufacture of
a particular kind of cigar. At one, the girls are
rolling up Regalias; at another, the fat bulgy
cigars called Lopez; at a third, Bengal Cheroots;
at a fourth, Pickwicks, and so on. After the
cigars have been taken up to the judge's stand
to be weighed and counted, they are handed
over to another set of girls, who assort them
according to colour. In the same bunch of
tobacco there will be found some leaves much
darker than others. These dark-coloured cigars
are put into boxes by themselves, and by some
are fondly believed to be full flavoured, though
they are precisely the same in strength and
quality as the light-coloured. The only object
in separating them is to secure uniformity
of colour. A mixture of dark and light cigars
in a box would not "look well." The assorted
cigars are placed in a miniature truck, which
runs down a miniature railway, through a large
shaft communicating with the ground floor,
where the cigars are packed in boxes.

A word here as to the quality of cigars.
Cigars of foreign manufacture are only superior
to those of British make because they are
composed of a finer quality of tobacco. Certain
monopolists in Havannah keep all the best
qualities for their own manufacture. If those
choice crops were sent over here, we could
make cigars equally as good. There is no secret
in the preparation of the leaf, nor in the
manufacture; nor does any deterioration occur during
a sea voyage. All we want is the pick of the
leaves. British manufacturers, however, are
not particularly desirous to be so favoured.
They could not get the price for the best cigars
if it were known that they were rolled up in
this country. It is a very common thing for