Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/799

1868.] pressed. But the chemical and practical processes of the trade; the seasons when wines show a disposition to renew their fermentation, at which time only they can be successfully mixed, and the seasons when they do not show it;—the compounding of the juice of astringent grapes with those not astringent—the experiments to ascertain whether wine shows a disposition to renew its fermentation or bear its fret, and whether the mixing will fret in—all having to do with the production of wines suited to the palate, and fitted for the table, are secrets wine drinkers do not understand. In longer or shorter time the 80,000 odd pipes of wine in the vaults below, all give their contents to the mixing vats, before the article is offered for sale in market.

The tea warehouse, erected at a cost of £250,000 sterling, where 330,000 chests were stored; the wool floors, glass-roofed and capacious, containing at that time 220,000 bales of imported fleeces; the tobacco warehouse—the "Queen's"—rented by Government for £14,000 per annum, its five acres of area covered by an iron-framed roof, where 48,000 huge hogsheads of tobacco, piled two in height, formed walks and passages hundreds of feet in length; and the ivory warehouse, with its tusks of the elephant and rhinoceros assorted in quality and labelled with date and place of capture, piled in heaps or hung on horizontal frames, occupied several hours of constant walking. To these, however, should be added the warehouses for cork, stacked like sheaves of barley; for bins of horns; for barrels and hogsheads of sulphur; for sugars, where the leakage covers the floors with a consistence sticky as tar; and for dyestuffs where (for what reason I do not know) mixed with their native smell was a strong fungus odor of dry-rot—warerooms, not one of which, when taken in connection with its stores, was without its peculiar history and interest. It was easy enough to see that, with the constant shifting of these vast piles of merchandise, more than one hundred overseers and twenty-five hundred laborers, even in a "slack tide and dead wind," would find plenty of work to do, and that, when the wind served and business was brisk, the unlading and lading of ships would require from 1,000 to 2,000 additional hands out of the wretched crowd I had seen in the morning.

We had noticed in the "Queen's" Warehouse, near the northeast corner, a partially defaced signboard, inscribed "To the Kiln," and had inquired its meaning. The answer received was not satisfactory, but the fact had passed out of mind, when, upon the completion of our rounds, our inspector remarked, "Now, gentlemen, if not too tired, I'll show you what we used to do," and conducted us back to the sign-board. Passing through a double iron door, over which was painted the crown royal and the letters V. R., we were ushered into a fire-proof apartment about forty feet square, in the centre of which was a huge furnace surmounted by a chimney one hundred and thirty feet high. This is called the "Queen's Pipe," and gives the name to the apartment itself. Here for many years the fire never went out. Relays of stokers fed the flames with condemned goods, and inspectors were constantly on guard that nothing once admitted within the iron doors might ever come out. All articles of merchandise upon which the customs's duties and expenses had not been paid, and which, after a year's storage and subsequent advertisement in the Gazette, remained unclaimed, teas, silks, provisions and dye-stuffs, peltry from the Arctic regions and drugs from the Tropics, India shawls and Cashmere wool, spices from Sumatra, palm-oil from the Gold Coast and cigars from Cuba, timber, corn, tar, pearls and hides, were alike consumed in the remorseless flames. Teas, from the intense fire they created, having once threatened destruction to the warehouses, were subsequently destroyed in