The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-05-19
RICHMOND A TOURIST HEAVEN; BUT A GUIDE WOULD STARVE)
Whole City Puts Itself Out to Show Strangers Where to Go and How-Pungent Smell of Tobacco Everywhere Until You're Inoculated by Visiting One Of the Sig
 Factories and Getting Wholesale Whiff
By ZOE BECKLEY

sos won could bear em for blocks. But the new generations different"
 We were passing through mountains or tobacco. Some was in enormous parrels holding nearly ton each' Just III rom tbe market Some was beins separated, dried. steamed, toasted, roasted, shreded, baked. boiled. rolled, pressed, cut, slfted, favored granulated, shoveled and packed. A great many things are done to it before it is sent to the Newfound- land fishermen and the gentlemen 1n ol- fees and the men in the trenches.
 OLD HABIT DYING OUT
 "How can any human teeth bite through this?" | asked my guide, pick ing up a slab of ebony-colored stun that looked like a brunette bedslat
 Ior' bless you, ma am, that amt 10 be bitu' he grinned That's to be cut up in small cakes and finally whittled off to put in pipes or rubbed up for cigar- ettes They aint nobody chews much nowadays I been working here 3o ood years. When I was a young man every body chewed tobacco. Now we don't put out two per cent of plug.
 But there's more smoking, he added encouragingly. q even hear ladies smokes some. But chewin gone out 1T folks chews nowadays, they chew mostly gum. All these here tons of tobacco Will be burnt up inside a year."
 Nearly all the male employees at the Larus factory are colored-some of them old men who have worked there all their lives. The treatment of tobacco seems to be a sort of colored industry, white men never having taken to it much. The darkies have 'sorter grown up With IL and seem to know how to hanlle it. the superintendent said.
 Have much trouble getting labor?" 1 asked as we stood beside a boisterous lOl1fr 1to1 NAIyf eyta Of,aiYN er vats rank with the odor of sweetened licorice.
 Not much since the state went dry he answered. Before that we almost had to quit work Mondays, and sometimes Saturdays, too But now they find some thing else to do besides drinking. It's whole lot better for us all.'
 SAVINGS BANK GUSTS SALOON
 Another man pointed out to me little savings bank That there corner,' said he with pride used to be a saloon. Looks better the way ts now, don't it!''
 But aren't there blind tigers around everywhere?" I asked skeptically.
 If there is any, he answered with an expression I almost thought was wistful ness, T don't know where they're at!'
 In the packing room where delft fingers flew over stacks of neatly sliced weed, batting it into varicolored boxes cov- cred with labels and ribbons and seals, I saw many pairs of gray and white shoes of the high-heeled, high laced va riety so familiar on Broadway.
 How much do the girls and women make?' I asked.
 "Oh, it's pieceworll, mostly. If they come every day they can make seven or eight dollars, and the men nine or ten. But most of them don't work every day all day"
 I looked again at the pretty faces and the pretty little fancy boots, and thought of the muddy streets outside frightened by a and 10-cent movie here and there. And I thought again for the millionth time how much human nature is like human nature; whether on Fifth avenue or in a Richmond tobacco factory.