fold or two
wrapped round it of more delicate quality. He took me into the different
rooms where the manufacture was going on. In the first were perhaps a
hundred or a hundred and fifty sallow-faced young men engaged in
rolling. They were all Cubans or Spaniards with the exception of a
single negro; and all, I should think, under thirty. On each of the
tables was one of the names with which we have grown familiar in modern
cigar shops, Reynas, Regalias, Principes, and I know not how many else.
The difference of material could not be great, but there was a real
difference in the fineness of the make, and in the quality of the
exterior leaf. The workmen were of unequal capacity and were unequally
paid. The senor employed in all about 1,400; at least so I understood
him.

The black field hands had eighteenpence a day. The rollers were paid by
quality and quantity; a good workman doing his best could earn sixty
dollars a week, an idle and indifferent one about twelve. They smoked as
they rolled, and there was no check upon the consumption, the loss in
this way being estimated at 40,000 dollars a year. The pay was high;
but there was another side to it--the occupation was dangerous. If there
were no boys in the room, there were no old men. Those who undertook it
died often in two or three years. Doubtless with precaution the
mortality might be diminished; but, like the needle and the scissor
grinders in England, the men themselves do not wish it to be diminished.
The risk enters into the wages, and they prefer a short life and a merry
one.

The cigarettes, of which the varieties are as many as there are of
cigars, were made exclusively by Chinese. The second room which we
entered was full of them, their curious yellow faces mildly bending over
their tobacco heaps. Of these there may have been a hundred. Of the
general expenses of the establishment I do not venture to say anything,
bewildered as I was in the labyrinthine complication of the currency,
but it must certainly be enormous, and this house, the Partagas, was but
one of many equally extensive in Havana alone.

The senor was most liberal. He filled my pockets with packets of
excellent cigarettes; he gave me a bundle of cigars. I cannot say
whether they were equal to what I bought from my _contrabandista_, for
these may have been idealised by a grateful memory, but they were so
incomparably better than any which I have been able to get in London
that I was tempted