From the equalizing room the sweat boxes are taken to the packing room.  Here they are first weighed.  The first and second grades are passed to the sorter, while the third grade raisins are placed in a big machine that strips off the stems and grades the loose raisins in three or four sizes.  These are placed in sacks and sold as loose raisins.  The higher grades are carefully sorted into first and second class clusters.  After this sorting the boxes are passed to women and girls, who arrange the clusters neatly in small five pound boxes with movable bottoms.  These boxes are placed under slight pressure, and four of them fill one of the regular twenty pound boxes of commerce.  The work of placing the raisins in the small boxes requires much practice, but women are found to be much swifter than men at this labor, and, as they are paid by the box, the more skillful earn from $2 to $3 a day.  It is light, pleasant work, as the room is large, cool and well ventilated, and there is no mixing of the sexes, such as may be found in many of the San Francisco canneries.  For this reason the work attracts nice girls, and one may see many attractive faces in a trip through a large packing house.  One heavy shouldered, masculine-looking German woman, who, however, had long, slender fingers, was pointed out as the swiftest sorter in the room.  She made regularly $3 a day.  The assurance of steady work of this kind for three months draws many people to Fresno, and the regular disbursement of a large sum as wages every week goes far to explain the thrift and comfort seen on every hand.

The five pound boxes of grapes are passed to the pressing machine, where four of them are deftly transferred to a twenty pound box.  The two highest grades of raisins are the Dehesa and the London layers.  It has always been the ambition of California’s raisin makers to produce the Dehesa brand.  They know that their best raisins are equal in size and quality to the best Spanish raisins, but heretofore they have found the cost of preparing the top layer in the Spanish style very costly, as the raisins had to be flattened out (or thumbed, as it is technically called) by hand.  In Spain, where women work for 20 cents a day, this hand labor cuts no figure in the cost of production, but here, with the cheapest labor at $1.50 a day, it has proved a bar to competition.  American ingenuity, however, is likely to overcome this handicap of high wages.  T.C.  White, an old raisin grower, has invented a packing plate of metal, with depressions at regular intervals just the size of a big raisin.  This plate is put at the bottom of the preliminary packing box, and when the work of packing is complete the box is reversed and the top layer, pressed into the depressions of the plate, bears every mark of the most careful hand manipulation.  Mr. Butler used this plate for the first time this season, and found it a success, and there is no question of its general adoption.  Every year sees more attention paid to the careful