The singing of the negroes is a great feature of the stemming department in a tobacco factory.  Some of the singers become locally famous; also, I was told by the superintendent, they become independent, and for that reason have frequently to be dismissed.  The wonderful part of this singing, aside from the fascinating harmonies made by the sweet, untrained negro voices, is the utter lack of prearrangement that there is about it.  Now there will be silence in the loft; then there will come a strange, half-savage cry from some dark corner, musical, yet seemingly meaningless; soon a faint humming will begin, and will be taken up by men and women all over the loft; the humming will swell into a chant to which the workers rock as their black hands travel swiftly among the brown leaves; then, presently, it will die away, and there will be silence until they are again moved to song.

From shadowy room to shadowy room, past great dark bins filled with the leaves, past big black steaming vats, oozing sweet-smelling substances, past moist fragrant barrels, always among the almost spectral forms of negroes, treading out leaves with bare feet, working over great wicker baskets stained to tobacco color, piling up wooden frames, or operating the powerful hydraulic presses which convert the soft tobacco into plugs of concrete hardness—­so one goes on through the factory.  The browns and blacks of these interiors are the browns and blacks of etchings; the color of the leaves, the old dark timbers, the black faces and hands, and the ragged clothing, combined with the humming of negro voices, the tobacco fragrance, and the golden dust upon the air, make an indescribably complete harmony of shade, sound, and scent.

The department in which the pipe tobacco is packed in tins is a very different sort of place; here white labor is employed:  a great many girls seated side by side at benches working with great digital dexterity:  measuring out the tobacco, folding wax paper cartons, filling them, and slipping them into the narrow tins, all at a rate of speed so great as to defy the sight, giving a sense of fingers flickering above the bench with a strange, almost supernatural sureness, like the fingers of a magician who makes things disappear before your eyes; or like the pictures in which post-impressionist and cubist painters attempt to express motion.

“May I speak to one of them?” I asked the superintendent.

“Sure,” said he.

I went up to a young woman who was working, if anything, more rapidly than the other girls at the same bench.

“Can you think, while you are doing this?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, without looking up, while her fingers flashed on ceaselessly.

“About other things?”

“Certainly.”

“How many cans do you fill in a day?”

“About thirty-four to thirty-five hundred on the average.”

“May I ask your name?” She gave it.