ABOUT CIGARS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 89, 3 June 1911, Page 2

ABOUT CIGARS.

The average man thought there was nothing more to ho said when Kipling wrote “A good cigar is a Smoke.” Mr Sydney Brooks, writing in an English journal, after a visit to Havana, deelares ttiat the word is quite inadequate. A good cigar, he says, is a salad. ,I'he finished article may ho compounded of leaves not. from one plantation, hut from a dozen, and not of one year only, hut of several. The duty of selecting the leaves so that the parent hlend shall predominate, hut at the same time he subject to the various minute differences that distinguish the different cigars of the same brand, is one that demands an extraordinary degree of skill and discrimination. The mere work of rolling is delicate enough, and it is cause for astonishment that the maker can turn out from fifty to a hundred cigars a day. Ho has neither mould nor hinder nor model, hut all that he rolls will ho identical in shape, size and weight. The maker is a highly-paid piece-worker, and it. is his habit to take a day or so off when the desire to do so seizes him. Even when he works he has to be amused, and in every cigar factory in Havana one will find a reader, engaged and paid by the cigar-makers themselves, standing in an improvised pulpit near the centre of the room and regaling his audience with the daily paper or a novel. Some of these readers receive as much as £8 and £lO a week, and not a few of them wore elected as members of the first Cuban Legislature. The Biblical precept that there shall ho no muzzling of the ox rhat I 'treacl'd the corn is applied to the cigar--maker; it is his right while lie is at work to smoke his employer’s tobacco. There is an old talc of how (Just.ivo Beck offered to make his employees a present of his factory and plantations if they in return would give him the cigars they rolled for themselves. Having reviewed all the papular ideas of (lie way in which the merit of a cigar can he tested, Mi Brooks agrees with the exports that none of them are of any value. Eoi the average man, anxious to find out whether a given Havana is of good quality .throughout and will burn well, the only real test is to .-.moled it.