224 TEA AND SILK FAEMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 



sparingly as regards strong and flavoury food, because the delicacy 

 of the young leaf is such that the Chinese farmer deems extra- 

 ordinary precautions necessary in order to prevent deterioration 

 through the acquisition of any objectionable taint. In promotion 

 of this object the girls are required to have passed through a 

 season of hygienic precautions and training immediately prior to 

 the commencement of the harvest ; and during their employment 

 they are altogether debarred the use of garlic and other herbs or 

 condiments of which all classes of Chinese are fond. Beaching 

 the scene of their labours, each detachment, accompanied by 

 coolies to bear away the pluckings to the central drying-shed or 

 manipulating hong, begins upon a separate plot of tea bushes, 

 and in a few hours a due proportion of the flushes have been 

 carefully removed. In the conscientious performance of this 

 first operation of the tea harvest, simple as it may appear, much 

 of the subsequent high character and value of the finished 

 article depends. In the early days of some of our Indian tea- 

 plantations the blameworthy habit of stripping the branches — 

 that is, grasping them at their junction with the main stem, and 

 drawing the closed fingers sharply along, thus clearing them at 

 one sweep of every bud and leaf — -was too often practised. It 

 was a most reprehensible custom, and was only indulged in by 

 unscrupulous pluckers when safe from the eye of the superin- 

 tendent, in order to save themselves trouble and quickly to 

 augment the contents of their baskets, thereby completing the 

 day's " task " in the shortest space of time. The practice damaged 

 the tea-bushes, and proved eminently detrimental to the value of 

 the finished tea, which, under such rough initial manipulation 

 never gave a satisfactory result. In China, the indigenous home 

 of tea-farming, such serious but quite preventible practices could 

 scarcely happen ; and it may be asserted with every confidence 

 that where British ladies and girls of even the most ordinary 

 education were employed, as in a I^ew Zealand garden, such 

 wilful yet stupid bungling would be next to an impossibility. 



Some of the indoor duties connected with tea manufacture, 

 which in China are performed by women, have already been 

 noticed ; and as those of that department of sericiculture which 

 are conducted under cover are everywhere acknowdedged to be 

 specially suited for them, we shall refrain from recapitulation 

 and change the scene to the margin of one of the enchanting 

 lakes of New Zealand. 



Let the reader in imagination now follow us there to a model 

 chasericultural farm of the future, in order to see how we pro- 

 pose employing educated women upon whom fortune may have 

 frowned at home, and whose friends have aided in reaching the 

 Antipodes. 



It is about the beginning of September, the first month of 



