raisins—ah! how nice they were when, as
children, we were allowed to stone the plums
for the Christmas pudding, and stole more than
we stoned!—on the sly. The pastrycook's girl
runs to the counter, indulges in a revel of
patties and jam tarts; but in a fortnight, she
becomes palled, and a wilderness of sweets
rarely invites her to browse. It is different
with the merchant who sells good cigars. He
knows when he is well off, and makes the most
of his opportunity. "Comte et conne" is his
motto, as it was that of the Regent Orleans.
Heart-complaint, paralysis, liver-complaint,
dispepsia, cerebral disease in its thousand-and-one
forms, may menace those who smoke too much;
but the merchant knows when he has a good
article on hand, and continues to smoke the
choicest weeds in his stock. A cigar merchant
who did not smoke seems to me quite as much
of a monster as that French bibliomaniac of the
eighteenth century, whom La Bruyère knew,
who had a library of eighty thousand volumes,
splendidly bound, and who confessed that he
never read a book. "I think," says La Bruyère,
in his mention of this person, "that he only
amassed volumes because he liked the smell of
new leather. But why, then, didn't he turn
tanner instead of bookworm?"

I have a distinct impression that after Señor
Anselmo del Valle had squeezed my hand—he
squeezed everybody's hand—on my being
presented to him, he left in my palm a Cabaña
regalia. They give away cigars in Cuba as
they give away pinches of snuff elsewhere. I
went into the back warehouse to choose a case
of punsados for ordinary smoking, and the
warehouseman gave me a handful just to try
what their flavour might be like. These are
among the "obsequies." When I got home to
the Globo that evening, I found even a more
splendid "obsequy" from the Cabaña factory,
in the shape of a beautiful crystal casket framed
in gilt bronze, inscribed with my name—
''Caballero Inglis" being added as a dignity—
and containing one hundred of the superlative
cigars known as excepcionales. These are said
to be worth in England half-a-crown apiece, and
are, indeed, only manufactured in order to be
dispensed to crowned heads or presented as
"obsequies" to tourists. I am ashamed to say
that—sentiments of gratitude apart—I would
grudge sixpence for the best excepcionale that
ever was made. Their mere facture is beyond
compare. They are perfect convoluted bâtons
of tobacco-leaf, mathematically symmetrical,
showing not a join, a vein, or a pimple—with
the broad end as round and smooth as that of
a Cumberland pencil; with the narrow end
as sharply blunt—a paradox, but a truth for
all that—as the agate braur used for embossing
diapers in illumination. I think that were you
to throw an excepcionale into the midst of
Westminster Hall, it would not break, nor lie,
but the rather rebound, elastic, and come back
to you at last, intact, but bent, boomerang
fashion. Its defect is that it is a world too light
—that is to say, too mild in flavour—and
that, like all mild cigars, it is hot in the mouth.
To the thorough smoker there is no more feverish
tobacco than the lightest Latakia, and no cooler
than the strongest Cavendish. Mild tobacco-
smoking leads to drinking: witness the Turk,
with his continually replenished coffee-cup, and
the German, who washes down the chopped-up
haystacks which he crams into his pipkin of a
pipe with innumerable mugs of beer. Not
always innumerable. They count them some-
times. The Prussian guardsmen who were
regaled the other day at Berlin were allowanced
to one bottle of wine and ten scidels of beer
apiece. Ten scidels—ten mortal pints and a
half of swipes in one October evening! It must
ooze through their pores, and make them
clammy.

From the hospitable retail establishment of
the señor to his factory, or rather that of the
Hija de Cabañas y Carvajal, is a drive of about
twenty minutes. The Fabrica is a grandiose
building of white stone, and of the architectural
style which may be described as West Indian
Doric: that is to say, with plenty of porticos,
and columns, and vestibules, erected much
more for the purpose of producing coolness
than pictorial effect. There are at least a
thousand operatives employed here; but the
mere number of hands is no test of the importance
of a cigar manufactory. At the huge Reale
Fabrica de Tabacos, in Seville, over four
thousand men and women, nearly half of them
gipsies, find employment. The Regio, at
Algiers, gives daily work to over fifteen
hundred hands. The cigar factories of Bordeaux,
Barcelona, Ancona, and Venice, are on a
corresponding scale of magnitude; but please to
bear in mind that the staple of the things made
in the usines I have named is mere muck,
rubbish, refuse; whereas the Hija de Cabañas
y Carvajal turns out only choice and fragrant
rolls of superfine tobacco.

If anything could improve on the dreamy
balminess which falls on the contemplative mind
in these vast halls, all devoted to the treatment
and preparation of tobacco, it would be the fact
that the ceiling of every room is of cedar. 'Tis
in the groves of Mount Lebanon, or, if you
choose to be more prosaic, in an atmosphere of
lead-pencils, that your weeds are made. I
confess that ere I had been half an hour in the
Cabañas factory I became immersed in a kind of
happy fog or state of coma, such as ordinarily
incited Messrs. Coleridge and De Quincey—in
the good old days when it was thought no harm
to crack a decanter full of laudanum before
dinner—to literary composition. This must
serve as my excuse for the very vague manner
in which I am enabled to describe the process
of making cigars. I know that I saw great
bales and bundles of tobacco, just brought in
from the plantations, being weighed in one long
hall by negro women. The stuff was piled into
monstrous scales, like those used in their dealings
with the Indians who had furs to sell by
the crafty traders in old Manhattan, who laid
down the axiom that a Dutchman's foot weighed