I Went With An Acquaintance To See The Inspection And Sale Of Tobacco. Huge, Upright Columns Of Dried Leaves, Firmly Packed And Of A Greenish Hue, Stood In Rows, Under The Roof Of A Broad, Low Building, Open On All Sides - These Were The Hogsheads Of Tobacco, Stripped Of The Staves.

The inspector, a portly man, with a Bourbon face, his white hair gathered in a tie behind, went very

Quietly and expeditiously through his task of determining the quality, after which the vast bulks were disposed of, in a very short time, with surprisingly little noise, to the tobacco merchants. Tobacco, to the value of three millions of dollars annually, is sent by the planters to Richmond, and thence distributed to different nations, whose merchants frequent this mart. In the sales it is always sure to bring cash, which, to those who detest the weed, is a little difficult to understand.

I went afterwards to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me, though the narcotic fumes made me cough. In one room a black man was taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of tobacco is composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting the leaves according to the quality, and others again were arranging the leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice. In another room were about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the age of twelve years up to manhood, who received the leaves thus prepared, rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and thus became ready for market.

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