were occupied by rows of stone vessels sunk
into the ground, behind which rows there
ran a narrow canal formed of masonry,
perhaps a foot wide and a foot in depth. In
each of the stone vessels there was a man
playing the part of pestle to its mortar. Each
man with his face to the wall grasped at a
bamboo railing fixed above, and went through,
in his own mortar, a system of wonderful
contortions. Under the feet of each man in
each stone receptacle there lay a portion of
the ground and sifted raw material there
immersed in water. All the living pestles
were at work beating the dye out of the stick
lac—where it had been stored up chiefly in
the blackish seeds, for I must beg leave to
call them seeds—into the water. When the
stick lac had been in this way made to yield
as much of the dye as could be got from it,
all that remained of raw material at the
bottom of each stone trough was taken out
and carried to another part of the factory,
where it was again washed by another set of
men till it would yield to water not another
stain of redness. Then the residue was
treated finally by a process, which I suppose
to be one of the factory secrets, for I was not
asked to see it. By that process it would be
purified; decayed and rotten portions would
be got rid of; something chemical, I dare
say, would be done to it; it would finally be
dried, and so become seed-lac.

We followed that in our imagination, and
remained in person by the vats, wherein the
Hindoo-pestles were so industriously kicking
up their heels. Each pestle, at the proper
time, turned the liquor charged with dye into
the canal behind it, along which it flowed to
a third side of the square, where it passed
over a new series of vats, in each of which it
deposited, as a fine flocculent powder, some of
the dye matter. This had been not
dissolved, but only suspended in the water,
somewhat as earth is suspended in a muddy
puddle. The fecula deposited in this way
would, in the next place, be collected and
placed in cloths under screw presses. In
these we saw the produce of some former
work-days squeezed to dryness. After pressing
it was next cut into cakes, each two and
a half inches square, and stamped with the
house stamp. Another drying and a cleaning
process finally prepared those cakes for the
market.

"And, if the question be not impertinent," I
said, "may I ask who are your chief customers;
I mean what other trades depend on yours,
and create the demand for this lac-dye?"
"Why," said my friend, "we are at the bottom
of the pomp of war. The red coats of the
British soldiers, meaning common soldiers,
are .all coloured with the inferior sorts of
lac-dye. As for the officers, whose cloth is a
good deal more brilliant, they are painted
up with cochineal from Mexico. But the
best lac-dye is not at all far behind cochineal
in brilliancy. Next to red soldiers' coats, I
think the chief demand for lac-dye is created
by the extensive use of it in sealing wax."

While engaged in making these few
observations. I had been troubled much by the
fetid nature of the smell about us, and had
narrowly escaped tumbling into vats flush
with the pavement, and full to the brim with
their dark lake-coloured liquor. Not sorry
to change the scene, I followed my friend into
another range of single-storied buildings, and
passed from an intensely moist into an
intensely dry air. Did Blankman, Asterisk,
and Company intend to celebrate that evening
a feast of sausages? The large room contained
a great number of fireplaces, all built
of mud, and all with their mouths full of
glowing charcoal. Before each fire there was
a woman cook, turning a white sausage some
ten feet long, and a man who at first sight
seemed to be basting it. I turned to my
friend, and asked what might be the meaning
of those cooks, and what sausages they turned
before the fire. " They are seedlac sausages,"
he said. "Seedlac, seasoned with a very minute
quantity of fine ground orpiment added in
solution, has been tied into those bags, and as
they turn before the fire, a gummy juice
oozes as you see lazily through the pores of
the cloth. The man cook, as you now see, is
not basting, but scraping off this juice, and
when he has enough upon his spatula, dabs it
down before the boy who has charge of the
cylinder beside him."  For indeed I should
have said at first that before each fire, and
engaged upon each sausage, there were not
only a man and a woman, but there was also
a boy. The boy had charge of a hollow
earthen cylinder, about two feet long and five
inches thick, having hot water inside it, and
being outside very smooth and highly burnished.
As the dab of melted matter bubbled
on the top of his cylinder, which was so fixed
that it sloped down, towards him, he with a
palm leaf deftly coaxed it, and flattened it
upon his great Italian iron; and having done
that, presently displayed to us a flat cake of a
bright orange colour, twenty inches square
and very thin—not more than a twentieth of
an inch thick. "I know what that is", I
observed, "for I have seen it often, although never
in so large a sheet".  "Yes" ,said my friend
Asterisk, "that is shellac, but it is generally
broken into little pieces by the time it reaches
the consumer. You shall take a whole piece
with you for the honour of the shop."

And so I left the shop, in which I had seen
employed a thousand men, women, and boys;
the premises themselves covering a space of
not less than five acres. There are, as I
before said, two of the large lac-factories in
Dashapore, and there are also several small
ones. Together they turn out about forty
thousand pounds' weight of the first class dye,
and about sixteen thousand of inferior and
native manufacture. The whole amount of
lac dye exported from Calcutta in one year
borders upon four millions of pounds, and the