More than half the elaborate processes are ‘lost work’ so far as the quality of the stuff goes; but the markets insist on a good-looking leaf, with polish, face and curl to it, and in this, as in other businesses, the call of the markets is the law.  The factory floors are made slippery with the tread of bare-footed coolies, who shout as the tea whirls through its transformations.  The over-note to the clamour—­an uncanny thing too—­is the soft rustle-down of the tea itself—­stacked in heaps, carried in baskets, dumped through chutes, rising and falling in the long troughs where it is polished, and disappearing at last into the heart of the firing-machine—­always this insistent whisper of moving dead leaves.  Steam-sieves sift it into grades, with jarrings and thumpings that make the floor quiver, and the thunder of steam-gear is always at its heels; but it continues to mutter unabashed till it is riddled down into the big, foil-lined boxes and lies at peace.

A few days ago the industry suffered a check which, lasting not more than two minutes, lost several hundred pounds of hand-fired tea.  It was something after this way.  Into the stillness of a hot, stuffy morning came an unpleasant noise as of batteries of artillery charging up all the roads together, and at least one bewildered sleeper waking saw his empty boots where they ’sat and played toccatas stately at the clavicord.’  It was the washstand really but the effect was awful.  Then a clock fell and a wall cracked, and heavy hands caught the house by the roof-pole and shook it furiously.  To preserve an equal mind when things are hard is good, but he who has not fumbled desperately at bolted jalousies that will not open while a whole room is being tossed in a blanket does not know how hard it is to find any sort of mind at all.  The end of the terror was inadequate—­a rush into the still, heavy outside air, only to find the’ servants in the garden giggling (the Japanese would giggle through the Day of Judgment) and to learn that the earthquake was over.  Then came the news, swift borne from the business quarters below the hill, that the coolies of certain factories had fled shrieking at the first shock, and that all the tea in the pans was burned to a crisp.  That, certainly, was some consolation for undignified panic; and there remained the hope that a few tall chimneys up the line at Tokio would have collapsed.  They stood firm, however, and the local papers, used to this kind of thing, merely spoke of the shock as ‘severe.’  Earthquakes are demoralising; but they bring out all the weaknesses of human nature.  First is downright dread; the stage of—­’only let me get into the open and I’ll reform,’ then the impulse to send news of the most terrible shock of modern times flying east and west among the cables. (Did not your own hair stand straight on end, and, therefore, must not everybody else’s have done likewise?) Last, as fallen humanity picks itself together, comes the cry of the mean little soul:  ‘What!  Was that all?  I wasn’t frightened from the beginning.’