ge, half-savage cry from some dark corner, musical, yet seemingly
meaningless; soon a faint humming will begin, and will be taken up by
men and women all over the loft; the humming will swell into a chant to
which the workers rock as their black hands travel swiftly among the
brown leaves; then, presently, it will die away, and there will be
silence until they are again moved to song.

From shadowy room to shadowy room, past great dark bins filled with the
leaves, past big black steaming vats, oozing sweet-smelling substances,
past moist fragrant barrels, always among the almost spectral forms of
negroes, treading out leaves with bare feet, working over great wicker
baskets stained to tobacco color, piling up wooden frames, or operating
the powerful hydraulic presses which convert the soft tobacco into plugs
of concrete hardness--so one goes on through the factory. The browns and
blacks of these interiors are the browns and blacks of etchings; the
color of the leaves, the old dark timbers, the black faces and hands,
and the ragged clothing, combined with the humming of negro voices, the
tobacco fragrance, and the golden dust upon the air, make an
indescribably complete harmony of shade, sound, and scent.

The department in which the pipe tobacco is packed in tins is a very
different sort of place; here white labor is employed: a great many
girls seated side by side at benches working with great digital
dexterity: measuring out the tobacco, folding wax paper cartons, filling
them, and slipping them into the narrow tins, all at a rate of speed so
great as to defy the sight, giving a sense of fingers flickering above
the bench with a strange, almost supernatural sureness, like the fingers
of a magician who makes things disappear before your eyes; or like the
pictures in which post-impressionist and cubist painters attempt to
express motion.

"May I speak to one of them?" I asked the superintendent.

"Sure," said he.

I went up to a young woman who was working, if anything, more rapidly
than the other girls at the same bench.

"Can you think, while you are doing this?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied, without looking up, while her fingers flashed on
ceaselessly.

"About other things?"

"Certainly."

"How many cans do you fill in a day?"

"About thirty-four to thirty-five hundred on the average."

"May I ask your name?" She gave it.

I took up one of the small identification slips which she put into each
packag