The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-06-07

shore. The mast takes the place of the
 display window and the merchant adver-
 tises that which he has for sale by sus-
 pending a sample thereof from the top
 of his mast. One can imagine the gro-
 tesque character of the scene when he learns that bundles of firewood, candles,
 buckets, brushes, barber's outfits, false queues, thread and meats are to be seen
 floating high in the air as they dangle from the end of a rope.
 Hankow is the great tea market Of China and here I saw my first tea bricks
 I had always thought it quite ingenious fin the Belgians to gather up the dust and siftings of the coal mines and compress them into bricks, with perforations for coaxing the draught, to De used upon the locomotive, in the factory, for cooking or keeping the grate alive.
 It seemed trifle odd for one to warm himself from the outside by means of brick, but stranger stili did it appear to me for one to be able to warm himself from the inside by means of brick Here again has the Chinaman anticipated mod ern invention and I am told that the classics of his land foreshadow all such modern inventions as the railway, electric light, telegraph, telephone and even the photograph. for it is recorded that many centuries agone Taoist teacher put his voice in box and sent it to a kindred soul. Two thousand workmen are en- gagged in making the bricks of tea and fashion considerably over a million of them annually. The bricks are made of the SbQ the dust so fine that the workmen stuff their nostrils with cotton to prevent their breathing the powder. The bricks weigh two and a half pounds and the dust is plunged in a cloth into a caldron of boil ing water where it remains but a few moments, when it is poured into q wood eni mold, put under a screw press and clamped shut. At the end of six hours the bricks are removed from the press and placed away to dry. So compact do they become under this process that al though but an inch in thickness and a foot long 1t requires heavy blow with some hard implement to break them. They are all handmade, for coolies' food costs less than would the fuel to propel steam driven machinery. They go to Mongolia. Siberia and Russia, wnere they are in great demand. And 1t is a long tournev which they make. hundreds of miles up the Han river, across country to the Yel- low river. and then by caravan on cam els through Siberia. Formerly Mini Nov gorod, in Russia, was the ultimate desti- nation of all this tea except that which was disposed of en transit and the camel caravans were one of the great sights of that market, where the bricks were the unit of exchange and often passed for currency, but the opening of the Suez canal changed the route of traffic and Odessa is now the center of the tea trade. I. is still fad in Russia to prefer car avan tea, many connoisseurs claiming that the herb absorbs the salt of the sea and odors of the vessel in it's marine jouf- ney. The beverage is protected against this by being shipped in air-tight lead cases. but even were such not the case the absorption of ship odors would be preferable to the taint of the cameps wool and caravan pack saddles. Caravan tea is used either simply because 1t Is a fad so to do or the Russians gustatory nerve is not very acute.
 In the matter of the tea season there is quite a similarity between Mini Nov gorod during the great market at Han kow. but the season 1aSrs only six weeks, from the first of May until the middle of June, and during that time the city is run at thigh pressure. It Is . sight well<