lemnly as
it shut. The effect in _silhouette_ was immense!

A company of China tea-merchants were gathered in the smoking-room after
dinner, and by consequence talked their own "shop," which was
interesting. Their language is not Our language, for they know nothing
of the tea-gardens, of drying and withering and rolling, of the
assistant who breaks his collar-bone in the middle of the busiest
season, or of the sickness that smites the coolie lines at about the
same time. They are happy men who get their tea by the break of a
thousand chests from the interior of the country and play with it upon
the London markets. None the less they have a very wholesome respect for
Indian tea, which they cordially detest. Here is the sort of argument
that a Foochow man, himself a very heavy buyer, flung at me across the
table.

"You may talk about your Indian teas,--Assam and Kangra, or whatever you
call them,--but I tell _you_ that if ever they get a strong hold in
England, the doctors will be down on them, Sir. They'll be medically
forbidden. See if they aren't. They shatter your nerves to pieces. Unfit
for human consumption--that's what they are. Though I don't deny they
_are_ selling at Home. They don't keep, though. After three months, the
sorts that I've seen in London turn to hay."

"I think you are wrong there," said a Hankow man. "My experience is that
the Indian teas keep better than ours by a long way. But"--turning to
me--"if we could only get the China Government to take off the duties,
we could smash Indian tea and every one connected with it. We could lay
down tea in Mincing Lane at threepence a pound. No, we do not adulterate
our teas. That's one of _your_ tricks in India. We get it as pure as
yours--every chest in the break equal to sample."

"You can trust your native buyers then?" I interrupted.

"Trust 'em? Of course we can," cut in the Foochow merchant. "There are
no tea-gardens in China as you understand them. The peasantry cultivate
the tea, and the buyers buy from them for cash each season. You can
give a Chinaman a hundred thousand dollars and tell him to turn it into
tea of your own particular chop--up to sample. Of course the man may be
a thorough-paced rogue in many ways, but he knows better than to play
the fool with an English house. Back comes your tea--a thousand
half-chests, we'll say. You open perhaps five, and the balance go home
untried. But they are all equal to sample. That's business, that is