The boy travellers in the Far East : adventures of two youths ... - Library

VISIT TO A TEA -WAREHOUSE. 2(1 'i
preserve it for a long sea-voyage. When it gets liere, it is delivered to
the large establishments that make a business of shipping teas to America ;
and let nie say, by the
way, that nearly all tlie -^a i,««,4ia4
tea of Japan that is ox-
ported goes to Ameri-
ca, and hardl)' auj of it
to any other country.
When we went into the
_ warehouse — they call
it a 'go -down,' from
a llindostanee word
they showed us a room
where there wei'e prob-
ably a hundred bushels
of tea in a great pile
on the floor. Men were
at work mixing it up
with shovels, and the
clerk who showed us
around said that they
spread all the tea out
in layers, one over the
other, and then mixed
them up. He said it
was a very difficult job
to have the teas prop-
erly mixed, so that the
samples should be per-
fectly even.
" We saw lots of
tea in another room where the same kind of work was going on; and
then they took us to the liring-room, and it was a firing-room, you may
believe.
TEA-MEECHANTS IN THE INTERIOE.
" It was like a great shed, and it had the solid ground for a floor. On
this floor there were kettles, or pans, set in brickwork, and each one of them
had a little furnace under it, in which there was a charcoal fire. There
must have been two hundred of these pans, and the heat from them was
so great that it almost took away my breath. I don't believe I could exist
there a day, and yet there were people wlio had to spend the entii'c day