movable bottoms. These boxes are placed under slight pressure, and
four of them fill one of the regular twenty pound boxes of commerce.
The work of placing the raisins in the small boxes requires much
practice, but women are found to be much swifter than men at this
labor, and, as they are paid by the box, the more skillful earn from
$2 to $3 a day. It is light, pleasant work, as the room is large, cool
and well ventilated, and there is no mixing of the sexes, such as may
be found in many of the San Francisco canneries. For this reason the
work attracts nice girls, and one may see many attractive faces in a
trip through a large packing house. One heavy shouldered,
masculine-looking German woman, who, however, had long, slender
fingers, was pointed out as the swiftest sorter in the room. She made
regularly $3 a day. The assurance of steady work of this kind for
three months draws many people to Fresno, and the regular disbursement
of a large sum as wages every week goes far to explain the thrift and
comfort seen on every hand.

The five pound boxes of grapes are passed to the pressing machine,
where four of them are deftly transferred to a twenty pound box. The
two highest grades of raisins are the Dehesa and the London layers. It
has always been the ambition of California's raisin makers to produce
the Dehesa brand. They know that their best raisins are equal in size
and quality to the best Spanish raisins, but heretofore they have
found the cost of preparing the top layer in the Spanish style very
costly, as the raisins had to be flattened out (or thumbed, as it is
technically called) by hand. In Spain, where women work for 20 cents a
day, this hand labor cuts no figure in the cost of production, but
here, with the cheapest labor at $1.50 a day, it has proved a bar to
competition. American ingenuity, however, is likely to overcome this
handicap of high wages. T.C. White, an old raisin grower, has invented