The profitable industry is now fairly established in several of the provinces of the Indian empire, but Assam still maintains its pride of place, being credited with one half of the tea produced; the tea districts of Cochin and Tibet supplying twenty-six per cent., Darjeeling thirteen per cent., the Himalayan districts six per cent., and British Burmah the remaining five per cent. Darjeeling prides itself upon the superior delicacy and aroma of its leaf; but the rough, pungent, malty flavoured product of Assam, which owes its character to the use of native in place of Chinese seed, is the recognised standard Indian tea. If the Assam planters may congratulate themselves upon overcoming the old-time prejudice in favour of Chinese seed, they have equally good reason to rejoice at having found a way to dispense with Chinese labour, once a grievous necessity. By offering high wages and constant employment, they are able to tempt Bengalese coolies to leave their beloved villages, and by providing comfortable huts with garden-ground in which they can install their wives and families, insure their staying in their new home. That they may not be saddled with useless hands, the tea-growers employ native foremen familiar with the work to act as recruiting officers. Twelve or thirteen years ago a violent tea-growing mania suddenly set in. Companies were formed by the dozen. The value of available land rose beyond all reason. Some unscrupulous schemers sold uncleared forest-lands as plantations; others, more unscrupulous still, obtained payment for plantations utterly non-existent in any shape, and genuine 'gardens' of forty acres fetched from twenty to thirty thousand pounds. Things have long since found their level again; but the possession of a tea-garden even now presupposes the possession of a capital of at least three thousand pounds, a smaller sum being deemed insufficient to start with, since no return is to be expected from a new plantation for the first three years, and it takes six years for the plants to attain maturity; then they will allow of eight or nine gatherings being made in a year, and yield four hundred pounds of leaves per acre. They improve with age; but planters of seedlings have little chance of seeing their trees at their best, if the Chinese and Japanese speak truly when they say the tea-tree lives to be five hundred years old, and grows better as it grows older.