When the sugar-plums leave the workman's or work-woman's hands they are not yet ready for consumption. They must be nice enough when fresh, but they have to be hard enough or of such a consistency as to stand travel. If chocolate enters into their composition, they would be likely to run if preventive measures were not used. The chocolate bonbons have to be hardened in currents of cool air. If there is no chocolate, or if it is in small quantity, the sugar-plums are dried by heat, but not at a high temperature. Some sugar-plums are frosted, by means of crystallized sugar, then a rich syrup is put on them, and slow drying gives them a silvery appearance. There is just as little touching of the sugar-plums as possible; not that the hands of the working-people are not clean, but to finger a bonbon before you help yourself to it is to take away something of its pretty bloom. I saw trays full of moulded chocolate bonbons, almond shaped, and some of them had a little rim of chocolate around them, which had exuded from the mould. A girl with a pair of gloves on was breaking off the excess of chocolate. Said the foreman: "Chocolate is so sensitive, that if the workwoman did not use gloves there would be thumb-marks, and a sugar-plum with a finger-mark on it is a spoilt sugar-plum. We have those gloves washed everyday." In the make-up of the ordinary one-pound box of mixed sugar-plums there generally are some fifteen varieties. It would take a five-pound box, probably, to hold the one hundred and fifty different kinds this manufactory turns out. [Illustration: PACKING CHOCOLATE.] In filling the boxes, some hundreds of empty ones are placed on a big table, and two or three women lay in the sugar-plums, one sort at a time in each box. Strange to say, you cannot hurry up this packing business. You cannot shoot sugar-plums into a box like coal into a bin. A bonbon refuses rough treatment. Be the least rude with a sugar-plum, and it is mashed. Gentle management does wonders with a great many things. If the bonbons themselves are excellent, much of their saleability depends on the way they are put up. The utmost nicety is used in the construction of the box, with its frill of lace paper and the bit of silver or gold cord or the ribbon used in fastening it. [Illustration: CREAM WALNUTS.] Some of the departments in this manufactory are noisy. Chocolate is a troublesome material, and it won't work well, save at certain temperatures. It has a decided disinclination to pack itself solid. A vast quantity of small tablets of chocolate are used. To make them the soft chocolate is placed in small tin moulds, and these are put on a rocking table, and the tins dance and rattle until the chocolate assumes the proper shape and consistency. Then sugared almonds in the act of manufacture make quite a racket. The almonds are surrounded with a sugar paste, and then put into revolving cylinders, and they roll and roll, making a sound like theatrical thunder.