Now, one finds but empty chests, hundreds in number, square, deep and strong, used for handling the tea in the factory. Ordi nary tea chests would not stand the rough usage.
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 con sented, 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 in a rough leaf on passing the meshes of a coarse sieve, with a gentle crush from the sifter's hands, enhances a rough bold tea much in value, In place of the rows of men then seen tiling and jerking their sieves in a monotony, only broken by the Cantonese taskmasters' roll call twice a day, before the general 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, now. The trained hands that turned the cranks with a uniform motion, sending the heavy tea, light tea and flaky dust each down its respective spout separated never again to meet except haphazard, mixed in a White chapel grocer's window.
The tea leaf separated in these fanning mills, has been parted with at the smart loss of Tls. 8,000 on 3,500 piculs to the foreign buyer, and he been let go to the London dealer or auction room habitue. The mills now stand still. The tea growers in the hills who waited through June and July for their money, have been paid. The losses to the packers here, however, have been so smart that there is little third crop tea now being packed in Foochow, and the mills will rest until another "May shall bring the physical courage bred of that blood back to the pale and dispirited native teamen. There are stacked in this huge gcdown a few hundred
packages of the native maker's brick tea wrapped in plaited bam- , boo strips, bound in half bamboo and triply rattanned. Aside here, the Chinese upper millstone is being turned upon the nether by a Chinese who is grinding the tea seeds left by a fanning mill.
In these sycee-boxes, sharp spades are falling upon tea stems, chopping them fine enough to go into the stemmy, dusty mixture to which the seed-dust gives the strength, while the chopped stems vouch for it's being tea.
In the firing house, four Chinese rice kettles, two feet across the mouth, sit obliquely upon edge, turn the tea back in a shower over the hand of the stirrer, a wood fire being kept up in the brick-work underneath. Fire holes, scores in number, follow in rows the walls of the firing house, in each an iron pan placed, now filled and rounded with charcoal ready to be lit. Placed over each of these fires is a huge hour-glass shaped basket-hood or muf fler that shuts in all the heat of each fire to but one outlet—that through the tea sieve that chokes the throat of each basket.
In these baskets is dried off the tea that comes in from the hills, wet or flat from constant down-pours and from the first fermenta tion of the leaf. These fires are out and all is still.
Here, too, on the floor above, the benches are empty where girls and women too often—to throw out the stems from the leaf, getting half a cent for removing those from the two cat ties of tea given them in wound bamboo woven trays.
The floor is now bare where we then saw the Ningteh tea brought to a ut iform shade, by shaking in bags with a few spoonfuls of lamp black; then balked upon the floor, only to be strewn white as a grave in spring 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 were rudely min gled together and put away in boxes for a night till the fragrance should have been robbed by the dead tea, and the faded flowers be thrown aside, spent and worthless.