twenty-one hours to
make the ninety-five miles' journey. There was no help for it; so, with
a sigh of sad expectation, I resigned myself to my fate, of which I had
experienced a short foretaste on my way to Pittsburg. I then inquired
what lions the town offered to interest a traveller. I found there was
little in that way, unless I wished to go through the pig-killing,
scalding, and cutting process again; but stomach and imagination
rebelled at the bare thought of a second edition of the bloody scene, so
I was fain to content myself with the novelty of the tobacco pressing;
and, as tobacco is the favourite _bonbon_ of the country, I may as well
describe the process which the precious vegetable goes through ere it
mingles with the human saliva.

A due admixture of whites and blacks assemble together, and, damping the
tobacco, extract all the large stems and fibres, which are then
carefully laid aside ready for export to Europe, there to be cooked up
for the noses of monarchs, old maids, and all others who aspire to the
honour and glory of carrying a box--not forgetting those who carry it in
the waistcoat-pocket, and funnel it up the nose with a goose-quill. How
beautifully simple and unanswerable is the oft-told tale, of the reply
of a testy old gentleman who hated snuff as much as a certain elderly
person is said to hate holy-water--when offered a pinch by an
"extensive" young man with an elaborate gold-box. "Sir," said the
indignant patriarch, "I never take the filthy stuff! If the Almighty had
intended my nostrils for a dust-pan, he would have turned them the other
way."--But I wander from the subject. We will leave the fibre to find
its way to Europe and its noses, and follow the leaf to America and its
mouths. In another apartment niggers and whites re-pick the fibres out
more carefully, and then roll up the pure loaf in a cylindrical shape,
according to the measure provided for the purpose. It is then taken to
another apartment, and placed in duly prepared compartments under a
strong screw-press, by which operation it is transformed from a loose
cylinder to a well squashed parallelogram. It is hard work, and the
swarthy descendants of Ham look as if they were in a vapour-bath, and
doubtless bedew the leaf with superfluous heat.

After the first pressing, it goes to a more artistic old negro, who,
with two buckets of water--one like pea-soup, the other as dark as if
some of his children had been boiled down in it-