"Each was armed with knives and cutters, and we watched the quick transformation of the flat leaves into the smooth and compact cigars. The tobacco grown upon the farm was, we discovered, only used as wrappers for the cigars. The good farmer imported, for the interior filling, a fine tobacco from Havana. Strips and little pieces of this the girls placed in the centre of the cigar, wrapping the Connecticut tobacco in wide strips tightly about it, then pasting each of the last with some paste in a pot by their side. It seemed to be done almost in an instant; the Havana slips were laid down, cut and trimmed, and pressed into shape in a twinkling; the wrappers were cut as quickly; and, more rapidly than I can describe it, the cigar was made. These girls were mostly daughters of neighboring farmers, who received so much per hundred cigars made; intelligent, bright-eyed and witty; many of them comely, with rosy cheeks and ruddy health; educated at the common schools, and able, their day's work over, to sit down at the piano and rattle away _ad infinitum_. "His stock of cigars thus made up, from the first sowing to the last finishing touch, the good squire (being Yankee-like, a sort of Jack-of-all-trades,) would have them put up in gorgeously labeled boxes, carry them to town, and sell them to retail dealers; not disdaining himself, twice or thrice a year, to go through the neighboring States with samples, and acting as his own commercial traveler." This description, however, may not convey a correct idea of the exact mode of manufacture to many growers of tobacco in the Connecticut Valley inasmuch as many planters of the "weed" make the entire cigar (more particularly for their own use) wrapper, binder and filler wholly of seed-leaf tobacco, such cigars do not readily sell to the trade except at inferior prices which admit of but a small profit to the manufacturer. The following spicy article from the "London _Figaro_" may be interesting to all smokers as well as guide them in the selection of a good cigar. "I am an imaginative person, and 'society' has treated me shamefully of late--its tangible delights are absent from me. Allow me, then, to console myself by the 'creations of smoke,' as Lord Lytton puts it. I am scouted by society because I am in love. I am told I look: "As hyenas in love are supposed to look, or A something between Abelard and old Bluecher."