smoked. There was an immense deal of litter
and rubbish about; for, it must be owned,
tidiness is not a thing you must expect to find in
tropics. There were also a number of the
sable sons of toil, and the hapless children of
bondage, lying about, in attitudes suggestive
to the artistic student of every conceivable
varity of foreshortening. They were asleep,
and dreaming, probably, of pumpkin. Slavery
I hold to be the dreariest and most detestable
of treadmills; but in Cuba the thralls doomed
to the degrading discipline of the "stepper"
seem to be oftener off than on the wheel, and
either exercise or the want of it has a
tendency towards making them comfortably fat.
As a rule, if at broad noonday you see
a negro awake, he is free. If asleep, he is a
slave.

At La Honradez only cigarettes, cigaritos,
papelitos, or whatever else you choose to call
the little rolls of tissue paper containing finely
chopped smoking tobacco, are made. The
process is very simple; and we took the place only
as a whet or relish before the more serious
tobacco banquet which we were subsequently
to enjoy at the great cigar manufactory of—
CABANA.

We passed through numbers of barn-like
rooms, vast and dim, where, squatting on
the floor in groups, negro men, women, and
children were sorting the tobacco, stripping
the leaves from the stalks, and arranging them
in baskets for the chopping-mills. There exists
a notion that any kind of tobacco is good enough
to make cigarettes with, and that, on the
principle said to be adopted in some sausage-
making establishments, anything that comes near
enough to the machine, "be it beef, or pork, or
a dog, or a cat, or a man, is forthwith sucked
into the vortex, and converted into polonies
or saveloys. This notion, so far as it
regards cigaritos, is, I am happy to believe,
groundless.

Very great care seemed to be taken in the
assortment of the leaves and the selection of the
prime parts; and I was assured that the paper
cigars of La Honradez were made from the
choicest Havana tobacco obtainable. They are,
certainly, very delicious to smoke. La
Honradez is, itself, modestly conscious of its own
merits, and on the little chromo-lithographed
wrappers which surround each bundle of twenty-five
cigaritos you read this motto: " Mis hechos
mi justificaran"—"My worth shall justify me."
Other factories are more self-laudatory and less
modest. " Todos mi elogian"—" All praise me,"
says one, on its wrappers. This may be true,
only the establishment ought not to say so.
"Mi fame per l'orbe vuela"—" My fame is
world wide," exclaims a third. This, again, is
a little too self-asserting; for I would bet
a reasonable number ot gold ounces that
my present respected reader never heard of
that particular establishment for making
cigaritos.

The paper cigars of Havana are not perfect
cylinders, closed at one end with a dexterous
twist, and provided at the other with a mouthpiece
of twisted cardboard and a morsel of
cotton wool to absorb the essential oil. Those
are the famous Russian cigarettes, made at
St.Petersburg or Moscow, of Turkish, Syrian, and
Bessarabian tobacco. The Havana cigaritos
consist mostly of so much finely chopped
tobacco placed in the middle of a little square
of very thin paper, neatly rolled up into elliptical
bâtons about an inch and a half long and an
eighth of an inch thick, and closed at each end
with a dexterous twist. The art of making
them lies in there being just enough loose paper
at the ends, but no more, to make the required
twist, and in there being a perfectly
homogeneous consistency of tobacco throughout the
entire length. If the roll be too tight, or
if, on the other hand, the tobacco be not evenly
distributed, and it bulges in one part and is
loose in another, the cigarito is useless.
Indeed, it must be made with almost perfect
nicety, to satisfy consumers: for almost every
Spaniard has in his own fingers an innate
gift for twisting and rolling his own cigaritos.
We have grown quite familiar, owing to the
French " sans nom" paper which, for a season
or two, obtained immense vogue in Paris, with
the tiny blank books from which leaves of
tissue paper could be torn to serve as envelopes
for the tobacco. Neither the French nor the
Germans, however, ever attained great
proficiency in this most difficult and delicate art.
The Italians abominate cigaritos, preferring to
smoke the more abominable cigars of native
manufacture; and I think that the majority of
Englishmen could more easily learn to curl hair
or play on the mandolin—two arts in which
they are never very likely to excel—than to roll
cigarettes. To the Spaniard the trick comes
naturally. He would roll up a papelito and
twist it faultlessly, in a third-class carriage in
the middle of the Box Tunnel. The old
Spaniards, however, it must be owned, are the
best hands, or rather the best digits, at papelito
making. The tropics take it out of a man, and
the Creole Cuban is fain to allow his slaves to
manufacture his cigars for him. Moreover, in
Cuba, cigarettes are but a pastime. His real
repast is in the Puros, or Havanas of the weed
itself; whereas in old Spain, genuine Havanas
are, through the idiotic financial policy of
the government, so difficult to obtain, and
cigars of native manufacture arc so execrable,
that the Castellanos smoke cigaritos in self-
defence.

Picking, sorting, and chopping tobacco, and
packing it up in the little squares of tissue
paper constitute only one section of the art
cultivated at La Honradez. Some hundreds of
young women and children, blacks, mulattoes,
and quadroons, are employed in cutting and
folding the paper, and in packing the cigarettes
into bundles and gumming the wrappers. These
wrappers themselves necessitate the maintenance
of a very large chromo-lithographic
establishment; and in an airy studio—the sun's rays,
however, tempered by screens of white gauze—