In Seville we saw a tobacco factory, erected more than a hundred years ago, at a cost of nearly two millions of dollars then! It is 652 feet long and 524 feet wide. Five thousand persons are at work in it all the time, putting the imported tobacco into cigars or cigarettes, and making snuff, and they use two millions of pounds of tobacco every year. Most of these workers are women. Mothers who bring their children have nursery arrangements provided for them during the hours of work. But the most of them are young women, a class by themselves, known as _cigareras_, or cigar-girls. Smart at their business in the factory, they are wild as hawks and gay as larks at the bull-fight on Sundays, or the dance on the green. This is the largest establishment of the kind in Spain, and produces as good an article as any other, but the cigars made in Spain are not as popular with good judges as those brought directly from Cuba. The manufacturers there prefer sending the best to London, New York, or Paris, where they find a readier market for the high-priced article. And the Cubans are as cute in concocting peculiar flavors for their cigars, as the French or the Italians for their wines, or Jerseymen for their cider. The connoisseur in tobacco pays a quarter of a dollar (more or less) for a “first-rate” cigar, and smokes it with delicious enjoyment at his club, or after dinner in his study, rejoicing in the dreamy, balmy languor that softly steals upon his senses, soothes his nerves, and makes him sweetly oblivious of the cares and toils of the day just passed. He is sure it does him good. And he does not know, and will not believe when he is told, what every one knows who looks into the subject to learn, that at the very root and source of the business there is as much concoction of tobacco as there is of coffee or wine. Potash and soda are in abundant use to impart peculiar pungency to the plant. And many in the excited atmosphere of New York or London life demand a sedative cigar more soporific than the narcotic plant in its natural state. For them, cigars are made of tobacco leaves _steeped in opium_. Many of our clergymen, renowned for eloquence and piety and learning, denounce with blazing zeal the baneful practice of smoking or chewing _opium_, a habit becoming almost as common in the United States as in China. But these same excellent men are daily smoking opium in their cigars, quite unconscious of the evils, physical and mental, they are gradually but surely inhaling with every breath they draw through this venomous weed. The cigar burns freely when first lighted, its ashes are grayish white, and the ring is faint at the end, the smoke rises lightly, and the taste, if any, is nearly imperceptible; therefore they _know_ it is a good cigar. But the opium-eater is not more surely a suicide than they. Dyspepsia often follows; and nervous debility, despondency, melancholy, insomnia, maladies supposed to be relieved by what is their producing cause.