is in this form. Cigarettes are
now imported from all portions of Europe, but principally from France.
Several factories have of late years been started in our own country,
but the cigarette _par excellence_ is made in Havana. Nowhere else do
we find capital so largely invested, labor so diversified, or such
attention to details. There certainly you can take your
choice--Honoradez, Havana, Astrea, Cherito, Henriquez, and dozens of
others of lesser note.

The tobacco used in the making of the Havana cigarettes is bought from
the cigar factors, but only from those who have the most assured
reputation. It consists of the leaves left from the making of cigars.
The necessity of securing the best grades of tobacco cannot be
overestimated. The judgment of the cigarette smoker is formed solely
from the sense of taste. He is totally unaffected by sight, which in
the cigar enables a clever workman to so roll bad tobacco that we are
predisposed in favor of an inferior article. While absolute inferiority
is intolerable in either, mediocrity, in Cuba at all events, is much
more readily tolerated in the cigar than in the cigarette.

The tobacco for the cigarette is not, as is generally supposed with us,
raised on the plantations of the various leading cigar factors.
"Bartegas," "Cobania," "Upman," or whatever be the name of our favorite
brand, does not depend for its success upon any one plantation. The
practice on the part of the leading houses is to send their purchasing
agents into the tobacco district as soon as the crop begins to ripen.
Sales are then and there arranged, immense sums sometimes being offered
in advance, by way of retainer, for a specially likely plantation. The
Vuelto Abago district is the favorite one, the planters there holding a
position not unlike that occupied by the proprietors of the "Sea
Island" plantations in days when "cotton was king." The ability to
control the market so as to bring to their own manufactories the
choicest tobacco is the main secret of the success of the larger
houses, not, as is frequently supposed, any particular superiority in
the workmen.

The principal cigarette factory is, as is well known, the factory of M.
Susini, "La Honoradez," "Honoradez" signifying in Spanish, honesty, the
motto of the house. It consists of a series of irregular buildings,
covering an area in space about equal to that occupied by the usual
Broadway block. On the upper floor of the principal building we f