k exchanges. Small
plantations are owned by individuals, usually the persons conducting
them. One or two thousand Europeans, mainly Englishmen and Scotchmen,
are employed on the important estates as managers, assistants and
accountants. Hosts of young Britons work a year or two without
compensation for the experience. They are called "creepers," and some of
them eventually obtain salaried offices, or embark in the industry on
their own account. The laboring force on an estate is provided chiefly
by Tamil coolies from southern India, and numbers from one to two
thousand. Both men and women contrive to lay by a competence at a wage
rate of from eight to fifteen cents a day.

If let alone, the tea-plant would grow to be a tree eighteen or twenty
feet high, but by generous top pruning it is kept down to three feet,
thus becoming a squat bush possessing a biggish leafing area. Every
eight or twelve days the shoots and young leaves are plucked--when
treated these become the tea of commerce. Tea-plants are alike, speaking
generally, grades being effected by the discrimination of picker and
sorter. Fresh buds and tender young leaves make the pekoes, older ones
the souchongs. Tea gathered exclusively from buds and tips is called
"flowery;" if the first young leaf be included, it is "orange pekoe."
In order of quality the Ceylon grades are: orange pekoe, pekoe,
pekoe-souchong, souchong, congou, and dust.

[Illustration: A KANDYAN CHIEFTAIN]

Tea-plants are perennial, and are set about four feet apart on
hillsides. At three years of age they become productive. Familiar sights
in the hills are the coolies with baskets of slips setting out plants
wherever unemployed spaces may be found, and groups of Tamil girls
plucking buds and young leaves from mature bushes. These girls are happy
countenanced, some slender and graceful in carriage and movement, and
none express objection to being snapshotted by travelers. The girls'
baskets are emptied and contents systematically sorted at convenient
places in the field, or at the factory. Essential to every important
estate is the factory, for there the leaves are withered, broken by
rolling, fermented, fired, and finally sifted into grades preparatory to
packing in lead-lined boxes ready to be despatched to the markets of the
universe.

It is reassuring to witness the system and scrupulous cleanliness of
every step employed in producing Ceylon tea. Anybody who has spent a day
on an up-cou