The priests, belonging, for a wonder, to a simple-minded class, receive us, of course hospitably. The stranger is at all times welcome to a lodging, and to his portion of the Buddhist vegetable dinner. These priests are like some of our monks in mendicancy charity, and superstition. In the pagodas they always have a meal prepared for the arrival of a hungry traveller. But hungry we are not; and we came hither to see the tea-plantations; these we now seek out. They are small farms upon the lower slopes of hills; the soil is rich; it must be rich, or the tea-plant would not long endure the frequent stripping of its leaves, which usage does of course sooner or later kill it. Each plant is at a distance of about four feet from its neighbors, and the plantations look like little shrubberies. The small proprietors inhabit wretched-looking cabins, in which each of them has fixed a flue and coppers for the drying of his tea. In the appearance of the people there is nothing wretched; old men sit at their doors like patriarchs, expecting and receiving reverence; young men, balancing bales across their shoulders, travel out, and some return with strings of copper money; the chief tea-harvest is over, and the merchants have come down now to the little inns about the district, that each husbandman may offer them his produce. There are three tea-making seasons. The first is in the middle of April, just before the rains, when the first leaves of spring are plucked; these make the choicest tea, but their removal tries the vigor of the plant. Then come the rains; the tea-plant pushes out new leaves, and already in May the plantation is again dark with foliage; that is the season of the second, the great gathering. A later gathering of coarse leaves yields an inferior tea, scarcely worth exporting. It should be understood that although black and green tea are both made from the same kind of leaf, there really are two tea-plants. The plant cultivated at Canton for black tea, and known in our gardens as _Thea Bohea_, differs from the _Thea viridis_, which yields the harvest here. The Canton plant, however, is not cultivated in the North; on the Bohea hills themselves, speaking botanically, there grows no Bohea tea; the plant there, also, is the _Thea viridis_. The difference between our green and black tea is produced entirely in the making. Green tea is more quickly and lightly dried, so that it contains more of the virtues of the leaf. Black tea is dried more slowly; exposed, while moist, on mats, when it ferments a little, and then subjected in drying to a greater heat, which makes it blacker in its color. The bright bloom on our green tea is added with a dye, to suit the gross taste of barbarians. The black tea will keep better, being better dried. There is a kind of tea called Hyson Pekoe made from the first young buds which keeps ill, being very little fired, but when good it is extremely costly. As for our names of teas,--of the first delicate harvest, the black tea is called Pekoe, and the green, Young Hyson; Hyson being the corruption of Chinese words, that mean "flourishing spring." The produce of the main or second harvest yields, in green tea, Hyson; out of which are picked the leaves that prove to be best rolled for Gunpowder, or as the Chinese call it, pearl-tea. Souchong ("small or scarce sort") is the best black tea of the second crop, followed by Congou (koong-foo, "assiduity"). Twankay is imported largely, a green tea from older leaves, which European retailers employ for mixing with the finer kinds. Bohea, named from the hills we talked of, is the lowest quality of black tea, though good Bohea is better than a middling quality of Congou. The botanical _Thea Bohea_ comes into our pots, with refuse Congou, as Canton Bohea. At Canton, however, Young Hyson and Gunpowder are manufactured out of these leaves, chopped and painted; and this branch of the fine arts is carried on extensively in Chinese manufactories established there. As the tea-merchants go out to collect their produce of the little farmers; so the mercers in the Nankeen districts leave their cities for the purchase, in the same way, of home-woven cloth. It is the same in the silk districts. If we look now into a larger Chinese farm on our way back to the Phantom, we shall find the tenants on a larger scale supplying their own wants, and making profit of the surplus. On such a farm we shall find also familiar friends, fowls, ducks, geese, pigs, goats, and dogs, bullocks, and buffaloes; indoors there will be a best parlor in the shape of a Hall of Ancestors, containing household gods and an ancestral picture, before which is a table or altar with its offerings.