Among the manufacturers and venders of tea in our “fair isle”—“the land of the wise, the eloquent, the free,”—the dried leaves of the birch, ash, or elder tree, and particularly those of the privet or white thorn, and the black thorn or sloe, (both which last-mentioned specimens possess more of the qualities of the tea leaf than any other known vegetable,) are manufactured and fabricated to represent this delicious article of English female consumption: and the colouring, dyeing, and staining process is accomplished by the agency of terra japonica, logwood, verdigris, copperas, Prussian blue, carbonate of copper, Dutch pink, &c. by the English, and, it is said, even by the Chinese artist; which ingredients (namely, the five last-mentioned,) are among the most potent poisons. According to Mr. Accum’s testimony (Culinary Poisons, p. 220, note,) Mr. Twining, the eminent tea-dealer, asserts that “the leaves of spurious tea are boiled in coppers with copperas and sheep’s dung.” And it is a known fact that tea-leaves are purchased, from the London coffee houses and shops, by a regular set of men, who make their weekly rounds for the purpose, to be re-dried and coloured. As it may be interesting to my readers to be informed of the progress of the “march of intellect” in the imitative process of preparing sham tea, and to have an opportunity of _admiring_ the ingenuity of fraud and villany displayed in the fabrication, I shall endeavour to gratify their reasonable curiosity. The white thorn and the sloe, or black thorn, as I have already said, are the principal leaves employed in the fabrication of the sham or imitative teas, on account of their possessing more of the qualities of the tea-leaf than any other known vegetable. From the white thorn is manufactured the green tea; and from the black thorn, or sloe, the black variety. These leaves are gathered and collected from the hedges around the metropolis, by a number of agents hired by the fabricators; and these sub-imps in the “black art” are rewarded for their honest labours with a remuneration of from one penny to twopence a pound. I have been told by one of those worthies that he is able to make between two and three pounds a week by his “vocation,” and has not “hard labour too;” for he likes, as he says, “to play oft at times a bit of the gentleman.” And, by a tea-leaf collector, I was once informed that his usual returns, or rather clear gains, were between six and seven pounds per week, and this “for only mornings’ work.” Of course, I suppose, like other large “capitalists” and “the moneyed interests,” he put on his silk stockings in the evenings, and exhibited his “sweet person” at “Almacks,” or some of the fashionable “Hells,” or “Evening,” or “Musical parties” at the “West End.” But, as to the indisputable reality of this “_transmogrification_,” your deponent knoweth not.