There are two crops a year--July and December--which yield 5 to 6 lbs. of dried pepper each for a single vine. When the berries are ripe the stalk is pinched off by hand and placed in an oblong cane basket, slung horizontally behind the plucker by a rope around his waist. The rounded ends of the basket extend a little on either side, so that the basket can be easily filled by either hand of the workman. The berries are rubbed off the spikes by hand and placed on mats or on the bare ground, to dry in the sun, when the weather is fair. In damp or cloudy weather they are placed in shallow, open baskets before a gentle fire. If the berries are left too long on the vines they lose part of their aromatic, pungent hot taste, and if gathered too soon they become broken and dusty in drying. After drying, when they become black and shriveled up, they are cleaned and winnowed. Good black pepper is firm and not too deeply wrinkled, does not easily crumble or break in the hand, it is also heavy and readily sinks in water. The inner seed should be hard, round and smooth and of a grayish-brown color. The outside pericarp should be brownish-black. A yellow tinge betrays over-ripeness and consequent loss of strength. A reprehensible practice among some dealers to hide defective peppers is to artificially blacken them and polish with oil. The usual method of judging quality is by weight, the grades technically being known as heavy, or shot, half-heavy and light peppers or corns. A one-litre measure may be filled with the pepper and the contents weighed, or 100 corns of average size counted and their weight ascertained. The variations of peppers of different qualities, according to their habitat, are given in the following table: Weight Variety-- per litre Singapore 476 grams Tellicherry 548 ” Lampong 511 ” Mangalore 574 ” Malabar 570 ” Acheen 407 ” It is evident that the moisture present in the corns plays an important part in the determination of the weight, and it will be necessary to bring the peppers up to the stated water content by either drying them or placing them in a moist atmosphere, or first weigh them dry and weigh again. A slight variation, however, from the figures given, is unavoidable. Singapore Pepper--The principal part of this import is the product of Sumatra, Borneo and Siam, collected at Singapore. A considerable quantity, however, is the products of the Straits Settlements themselves. It is of large size and of a fairly uniform quality, but as pepper powder it is not much esteemed, owing to the manner of drying, giving it a smoky flavor that buyers can distinguish Singapore pepper from peppers grown elsewhere.