188 ABOUT ORCHIDS. 
year. There is the printing-room, with no steam 
presses or labour-saving machinery, but the most 
skilful craftsmen to be found, the finest paper, the 
most deliberate and costly processes, to rival the 
great works of the past in illustrating modern 
science. These departments, however, we need 
' not visit, nor the chambers, lower still, where 
mechanical offices are performed. 
The “Importing Room” first demands notice. 
Here cases are received by fifties and hundreds, 
week by week, from every quarter of the orchid 
world, unpacked, and their contents stored until 
space is made for them up above. It is a long 
apartment, broad and low, with tables against the 
wall and down the middle, heaped with things 
which to the uninitiated seem, for the most part, 
dry sticks and dead bulbs. Orchids everywhere! 
They hang in dense bunches from the roof. They 
lie a foot thick upon every board, and two feet 
thick below. They are suspended on the walls. 
Men pass incessantly along the gangways, carrying 
a load that would fill a barrow. And all the 
while fresh stores are accumulating under the 
hands of that little group in the middle, bent and 
busy at cases just arrived. They belong to a lot 
of eighty that came in from Burmah last night— 
and while we look on,a boy brings a telegram 
