Huge, upright columns of dried leaves, firmly packed and of a greenish
hue, stood in rows, under the roof of a broad, low building, open on all
sides--these were the hogsheads of tobacco, stripped of the staves. The
inspector, a portly man, with a Bourbon face, his white hair gathered in a
tie behind, went very quietly and expeditiously through his task of
determining the quality, after which the vast bulks were disposed of, in a
very short time, with surprisingly little noise, to the tobacco merchants.
Tobacco, to the value of three millions of dollars annually, is sent by
the planters to Richmond, and thence distributed to different nations,
whose merchants frequent this mart. In the sales it is always sure to
bring cash, which, to those who detest the weed, is a little difficult to
understand.

I went afterwards to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me,
though the narcotic fumes made me cough. In one room a black man was
taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of tobacco is
composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting
the leaves according to the quality, and others again were arranging the
leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice.
In another room were about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the
age of twelve years up to manhood, who received the leaves thus prepared,
rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about
four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and
thus became ready for market. As we entered the room we heard a murmur of
psalmody running through the sable assembly, which now and then swelled
into a strain of very tolerable music.

"Verse sweetens toil--"

says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so fond of quoting, and really it is