TEA AND SILK FAEMIXG IN NEW ZEALAND. 225 



spring ia New Zealand, and the white mulberry bushes are 

 about to burst into leaf. Inside the magnaneries, or silkworm 

 nurseries, everything is in readiness : 600 ounces of eggs have 

 been exposed for the past nine days and nights to incubating 

 heat, and the worms are expected on the morrow. By dawn the 

 field and other employes are at their posts, and the night 

 having passed free from rain, a quantity equal to about three- 

 quarters of a ton of mulberry leaves is brought to the chopping 

 shed and one-half immediately reduced to fine shreds, thrust 

 loosely into large baskets, and quickly taken to the magnaneries. 

 Here the trays, which the previous evening showed nothing but 

 a thin scattering of minute eggs, are alive with myriads of tiny, 

 dark-coloured worms, eager to begin their month of almost con- 

 stant feeding, and each few trays have their appropriated lady 

 and girl nurses in addition to the general porters who bring in 

 and distribute the food. As the worms must be fed every six 

 hours throughout the twenty-four, the nurses are relieved after 

 the expiry of the first quarter, to be replaced by an equal number, 

 who in turn yield their charge to others, and they to a fourth 

 band, when the first detachment again go on duty. By this 

 arrangement each lady nurse and her attendants perform six 

 hours continuous work out of the twenty-four as long as the 

 silk harvest lasts. The other half of the mulberry leaves brought 

 in are dried in the sun, reduced to fine powder, and packed by 

 girls into large earthenware jars, to serve as food at the opening 

 of the following year's silk season, in the event of a partial 

 failure or tardy budding of the shrubs. The same routine, with 

 rapidly increasing quantities of leaves, goes on from day to day 

 until the cocoons are commenced, when a partial lull ensues. 

 Meanwhile fresh incubations of eggs are promoted as long as any 

 are left to hatch, and as long as the resources of the plantations 

 can produce seasonable food. 



In this scene of activity probably two months have passed, 

 and the tea bushes are showing promise of fiushing abundantly. 

 A brilliant November morning — corresponding with April in 

 China — has dawned, and the neighbouring hills are ringing with 

 the joyous shouts of hundreds of the briglit, bold, ruddy children 

 of British emigrants, intermingled, perhaps, with troops of laugh- 

 ing little Maoris, and not a few sedate and solemn-looking tiny 

 Celestials, all engaged in tea-])lucking, superintended by ladies 

 and girls from home ; some on foot, and others mounted on strong 

 Australian palfreys, bustling about the plantations and directing 

 the busy crowd. To some of our languid beauties in this old 

 country, on whose features an unmodified sunbeam rarely beats, 

 such a scene would appear simply one of horror. Yet those who 

 have already spent many years in New Zealand's delightful 

 climate, and whose experience of other fair regions has not been 



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