carefully placed in bulks, or regular rows, one upon another, and the whole covered with trash tobacco, or straw, to preserve it in a proper condition, that is moist, which prevents its wasting and crumbling to pieces.  But, to enable them to strike the cured tobacco, they must wait for what is there called a season, that is rainy or moist weather, when the plants will better bear handling, for in dry weather the leaves would all crumble to pieces in the attempt.  By this means a tobacco house may be filled two, three, or four times in the year.  Every night the negroes are sent to the tobacco house to strip, that is to pull off the leaves from the stalk, and tie them up in hands or bundles.  This is also their daily occupation in rainy weather.  In stripping, they are careful to throw away all the ground leaves and faulty tobacco, binding up none but what is merchantable.  The hands or bundles thus tied up are also laid in what are called a bulk, and covered with the refuse tobacco or straw to preserve their moisture.  After this, the tobacco is carefully packed in hogsheads, and pressed down with a large beam laid over it, on the ends of which prodigious weights are suspended, the other end being inserted with a mortice in a tree, close to which the hogshead is placed.  This vast pressure is continued for some days, and then the cask is filled up again with tobacco until it will contain no more, after which it is headed up and carried to the pubic warehouses for inspection.  At these warehouses two skilful planters constantly attend, and receive a salary from the public for that purpose.  They are sworn to inspect with honesty, care, and impartiality, all the tobacco that comes to the warehouse, and none is allowed to be shipped that is not regularly inspected.  The head of the cask is taken off, and the tobacco is opened by means of large, long iron wedges, and great labour, in such places as the inspectors direct.  After this strict attentive examination, if they find it good and merchantable, it is replaced in the cask, weighed at the public scales, the weight of the tobacco and of the cask also cut in the wood on the cask, stowed away in the public warehouses, and a note given to the proprietor, which he disposes of to the merchant, and he neither sees nor has any trouble with his tobacco more.  The weight of each hogshead must be 950 lbs. nett, exclusive of the cask—­for less a note will not be given.  Under the name of a crop hogshead, however, the general weight is from 1,000 to 1,200 or 1,300 lbs. nett, but if the tobacco is found to be totally bad, and refused as unmerchantable, the whole is publicly burnt in a place set apart for that purpose.  However, if it be judged that there is some merchantable tobacco in the hogshead, the owner must unpack the whole publicly on the spot, for he is not permitted to take any of it away again, and must select and separate the good from the bad; the last is immediately committed to the flames, and for the first he receives a transfer