commotion of many busy
persons. We entered and found ourselves in a long, low room,
having wide tables ranged along the walls; here, working
rapidly, were rows of chatty country girls, who, as they
worked, laughed and talked, and now and then hummed a verse
of some familiar ballad. Neatly packed piles of the dried
and cured leaf lay upon the table before them.

"Each was armed with knives and cutters, and we watched the
quick transformation of the flat leaves into the smooth and
compact cigars. The tobacco grown upon the farm was, we
discovered, only used as wrappers for the cigars. The good
farmer imported, for the interior filling, a fine tobacco
from Havana. Strips and little pieces of this the girls
placed in the centre of the cigar, wrapping the Connecticut
tobacco in wide strips tightly about it, then pasting each
of the last with some paste in a pot by their side. It
seemed to be done almost in an instant; the Havana slips
were laid down, cut and trimmed, and pressed into shape in
a twinkling; the wrappers were cut as quickly; and, more
rapidly than I can describe it, the cigar was made. These
girls were mostly daughters of neighboring farmers, who
received so much per hundred cigars made; intelligent,
bright-eyed and witty; many of them comely, with rosy cheeks
and ruddy health; educated at the common schools, and able,
their day's work over, to sit down at the piano and rattle
away _ad infinitum_.

"His stock of cigars thus made up, from the first sowing to
the last finishing touch, the good squire (being
Yankee-like, a sort of Jack-of-all-trades,) would have them
put up in gorgeously labeled boxes, carry them to town, and
sell them to retail dealers; not disdaining himself, twice
or thrice a year, to go through the neighboring States with
samples, and acting as his own commercial traveler."

This description, however, may not convey a correct idea of the exact
mode of manufacture to many growers of tobacco in the Connecticut
Valley inasmuch as many planters of the "weed" make the entire cigar
(more particularly for their own use) wrapper, binder and filler
wholly of seed-leaf tobacco, such cigars do not readily sell to the
trade except at inferior prices which admit of but a small profit to
the manufacturer. The following spicy article from the "L