Manufacture of Cigarillos. 317 



and skins of animals, &c., is proportionately but small. We 

 visited the great manufactories of Binondo, as also that of 

 Arroceros, where cigarillos, or paper-covered cigarettes, are 

 exclusively manufactured. The former gives employment to 

 about 8000 work-people, mostly women. In the long work- 

 shops, where it is common to see 800 females sitting at work 

 on low wooden benches in front of a narrow table, there 

 prevails a most disagreeable deafening hubbub. Some are 

 busy moistening the leaves, and cutting off the requisite 

 lengths, or are sorting the fragments and smaller pieces, of 

 which inferior cigars will be made ; others hold in their 

 right hand a flat smoothed stone, with which they keep con- 

 tinually pounding each single leaf, in order to make these 

 more susceptible of being rolled up. This drumming noise, 

 and the cries of several hundreds of workwomen, who, on the 

 appearance of foreign visitors, handle their implements of 

 stone with yet more energy, apparently out of sheer wanton- 

 ness, the strong odour of the tobacco, and the disagreeable 

 exhalations from the bodies of so many human beings shut 

 up together in one close apartment, in a tropical temperature, 

 have such an unpleasant, uncomfortable effect that one hastens 

 to exchange the damp sultry vapom-s of the workshops for the 

 fresh air without. 



In the Cigarillo manufactory about 2000 workmen find em- 



the more elegant of these fetching from 40 to 50 dollars (£8 to £ 10). Straw mats and 

 hats, not inferior in fineness of texture to those of Panama, are made here of palm 

 fibre, and form a not unimportant article of exportation. 



