on the right hand side.

Chinese Cashiers are said to be uniformly honest.



CHAPTER XI.

American Tea Culture.

During a period of at least 40 years, tea plants have been
cultivated by a few experimenters in the southern United states,
and American tea, grown South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, has
satisfactorily supplied the family needs of a hundred or more
persons, at a cost not exceeding the retail price of good foreign
tea.

When Mr. Wm. G. Le Duc, Commissioner of the Department of
Agriculture at Washington, seriously recommended systematic tea
culture in the southern States, press writers and press readers
found a new subject of mirth and standing jokes which lasted for
several years. To be sure, those who laughed so long and loudly
did not know the difference between a Chinese tea plant and a
China Aster, and few of them had ever heard that in certain tea
growing districts of China, ice and snow were familiar associates
of the hardy Chinese tea plant. Enquiry would have taught them
that here in the United States individual tea plants had for many
years withstood a freezing temperature in winter. Better informed
persons fell back upon the objection that Americans could never
learn the secrets of curing tea, and finally that the very low