than ordinary disciplined workmen in a great
national factory.

In other courts and rooms which I pass
through (following Virgil, who is, I think,
anxious to get to dinner, yet is not a refuser
of a peseta, or shilling) they are sawing deal
planks for boxes, knocking together huge
packing-cases, and burning in certain letters
which form the government brand. In
corners of the courts, under shelter of
porticoes, or drying in loose shuffling heaps on
the leaden roofs, high above the city, lies the
tobacco. There, are the great spear-headed
leaves, dry, dark brown, and fragrant, piled
in great sacrificial altar-heaps: all brought,
I suppose, from that mountain of tobacco I
saw gathered together, amid shattered wrecks
of scented Havannah packing-cases, in the
moat-like court of the government store at
Cadiz, fresh from the holds of West Indian
ships.

The cigarreras, or female cigar-makers,
three or four thousand in number, are the
special curiosities of the Seville tobacco factory.
They pass me by twos and threes,
laughing and chatting, bare-footed or grisettishly
shod, in every court and passage..
They are the Murillo women, the city Dulcineas,
and are a sect and caste of themselves,
employed here in slowly toiling through their
annual task of making two millions of pounds
of cigars. These are the women whose sires
perished in the fires of the Inquisition, in
the bull-ring, and the Moorish battle-field.
Knife, guitar, and cigar, they handle well.
What a clack and Babel of jarring tongues
there is as I enter the chief hall! where some
two thousand of these loose-clad matrons and
damsels are seated in vis-à-vis groups at long
low oval tables! Their bare arms and necks
seem as of unbaked clay, moist and yellow.
The nimbleness with which that woman with
the red handkerchief tied over her head and
under her chin, furls up the brown leaf into
a twisted tube is something near a miracle.
She has her little brown child in a rude
cradle by her side. The cradle is on rollers,
and she rolls them with her foot while her
hands twirl the cigar leaves. The little
Pedro is firm asleep on its back, with its little
fists catalepsied in the air. It has nothing
particular on, but a little ridiculous dirty
white shirt; and round its fat roll of a neck
dangles an ivory ring, which, I suppose, does
as well for dental purposes as a coral radish
mounted in silver. A bowl of paste is on
our matron's table. With this she fastens that
little nipple of the cigar which smokers bite
off as they would a fruit-stalk. On shelves
above her, are bundles of finished cigars,
brown and fluted like so many Pandean-pipes
cut into lengths. I do not see, round
them those pleasant soft crimson and yellow
silk bands which one sees in London
tobacconists'  windows; so, I suppose those are
added as a finishing off and final bloom.

But I must mention, only to show that I
had eyes, and saw what could be seen, that
our matron Caterina was not satisfied with
the double and onerous task of rolling
government cigars and rocking the dormant
Pedro; she was also dining; and her frugal
dinner of clouded yellow grapes, greasy to
the eye, salt-fish, and white cakey bread
were lying by her on the table, which was
rather dirtier than the floor.

It required a family man's assurance to face
those files of hungry, impudent, defiant, wicked
quizzing black eyes; still, I do not know that
I felt much the worse for them. So I went
on to other rooms, all full of mischievous
chattering girls, brimful of fun, and loading
white cigarette tubes or rolling those
brown Havannah leaves, so crisp and
fragrant. They form a pleasant gipsy encampment
as you take them, in a coup d'oeil,
from one end of the hall, with their red
and yellow head-cloths, strange coloured turbans
and impromptu coquettish draperies
twisted and bound round their coarse,
full-blooded faces. We see no more the old
mantilla that the ancient cigarrera wore,
and which was an Eastern sort of disguise,
such as you still see in the half Moorish town
of Tarifa. It was crossed over the face and
bosom, and was a provoking, enticing,
love-making article of dress.

I leave these young Jezebels to slander,
scandal, love confidences, and general happy
chatter, and pace on, following Virgil through
a train of more courts and anterooms; where
hags nurse children and cook dinners over red,
glowing charcoal. There were groups eating,
playing at dominoes, and there were children
who seemed merely waiting for their sisters
or mothers. There were stony-faced crones,
Macbeth witches, with throats a pucker of
yellow wrinkles—like the folding part of a
pair of bellows—sitting sibyl-like, waiting for
I know not what. And so, passing by more
coffin-rows of empty presses, and piles of
brown autumn tobacco-leaves, and talked
at by more wandering troops of cigar girls, I
break my way into the torrid street, and bear
towards the Giralda, which, mast-like (as
Ford, ever quick at similes, says), rises from
the brown-burnt sea of roofs, an eternal
monument of the Pyramid builders and their
bygone faith.

On my way, I meet and fraternise with
Fortywinks, the great traveller; a puffy,
red-faced man, with blue shorn chin and
bushy moustachios. I met him yesterday at
the table d'hôte, and, finding him intent on a
book about Spain, kept making signals of
friendship to him with the downward turned
decanter.

Fortywinks has round staring eyes, prominent
and projecting with eager observing;
he is dry about the lips with over-much
talking; he is one of the most voluble,
enthusiastic, self-satisfied noodles that ever
devoted himself to investigating the manners
of a country. His mind seems filled with