"Farther on, one came to the dozen long rows of sifters facing each other, forty in a row, the mesh of some taking a pencil, that of others refusing a pencil point—sifting tea-leaf rough and bold that, after a persuasive grasp or two of the hand, broke and consented, after a few shakes of the sieve, to be stripped of some of the sappy leaf-edges and leaf-ends and to appear below, the even and uniform leaf which the tea drinker insists he must have (plus the dust due to the persuading). The transformation iu a rough leaf in passing the meshes of a coarse sieve, with a gentle crush from the sifter's hands, enhances a rough bold tea very considerably in value.
"In place of the rows of men then seen tilting and jerking their sieves in a monot ony only broken by the Cantonese taskmasters' roll-call twice a day before the gen eral meal of fish and 'rice, there is now to be seen only the bare floor of hardened earth, piles of empty benches stacked in a corner and the sieves of the twelve different sizes used; each in its division in the three-story stands.
"The dozen or 'score of fanning mills are still, too. The tea-leaf separated in these fanning mills has been sold, and the mills will rest until another May shall bring courage back to the pale and dispirited native teamen.
"There are stacked in this huge go-down a few hundred packages of the native maker's brick-ted wrapped in plaited bamboo strips, bound in half bamboo and triply rattaned. Aside here, 'its manufacture still continues. The Chinese upper millstone is being turned upon the nether by a Chinaman who is grinding the tea seeds left by a fanning mill, and in these sycee-boxes sharp spades are falling upon the stems, chop ping them fine enough to go into the stemmy, dusty mixture to which the seed-dust gives the strength, while the chopped sterns vouch for its being tea.
• "Fire holes also, scores in number, follow in rows the walls of the firing house, in each an 'iron charcoal pan. Over each of these fires is a huge hour-glass-shaped basket hood or muffler that shuts in all the heat of each fire to but one outlet—that through the tea sieve which chokes the throat of each basket. In these baskets is dried the tea that comes in from the hills, wet or flat from constant down-pours and from the first fermentation of the leaf.
"ileie, too, on the floor above, the benches are empty where girls and women came to sort the rough stems from the leaf, getting half a cent for removing them from the two cattier of tea apportioned to them, in wound bamboo-woven trays.
"The floor is now- bare where' we then saw the Ningteh tea brought to a uniform shade, by shaking the bags with a few spoonsful of lamp black—then bulked upon the floor, to be strewn white as a spring grave with the pure muhli blossoms ; then blossoms in turn buried under another avalanche of funeral tea, and this again with blossoms, life upon death—then both rudely mingled together and put away in boxes for a night till the fragrance had been robbed by the dead tea, the faded flowers being finally thrown aside, spent and worthless.
"Our round finished at the shed where, out of long sheets of lead, Chinese lads were glibly making lead cases by moulding them, hatter-like, upon a box, and then running the soldering iron along the edges. Other Chinamen, in their natal costume, were washing off the dust and sweat of the day at a huge four-hogshead vat of hot water. There, too, were piles of wood for the hot tea-coppers, crates of up-river hardwood charcoal for the firing pans and firing baskets. We must leave without the sight we then had of the mad dervish dance of two Chinese, who, given a dozen pounds of tea stems in a tray, under their sandals perform about the interior periphery a double shuffle, twist and grind that is cooler for the spectator, the thermometer in the nineties, than for the performers from whose bodies the pers piration rolls onto the tea stems below.
"The box factory is elsewhere. We enter on our homeward way. It is in another old disused tea hong—occupied by foreigners in the days when money was made tumbled-down now and abandoned to Chinese. Inside, a few Chinese youths, eating a dollar's worth of rice per month, were rapidly gluing and dove-tailing together, by rough wholesale strokes, boxes by the score. Few nails are used, for these are hand made and cannot be afforded. What a bungling "mending", the merchant pays for when these frail cases reach the land of rough usage and coarse nails! "There you saw a bit of thin teakwood ; there a bit of paper gaudily daubed with cardinal colors—a stroke or two—side marries end, the gaudy paper cover hides all joints, and the catty-boxes, gay with bird, butter fly, dragon and phoenix, are en route to be stared at in a far-off grocer's window.