Hyson and Congou, who have their establishment at the corner of Mincing-lane, drive and have drivea for long an extensive trade in teas. The premises are new and almost luxurious; the rooms lofty, the staircases spacious, the plate-glass doors and windows magnificent. But an oppressive atmosphere of tea pervades the place—the less to be wondered at considering the quantities fof the herb stowed away in corners and corridors, in chests, alf-chests, and quarter-cheat, to say nothing of the amount that is always: brewing for the critical judgment of experts. Hyson and young; they would find their pet beverage on Congou's would be the very elysium of women old. draught there all the day long. {n office hours, from morn to noon, from noon to dusky eve, there ix one perpetual five o'clock tea ring forward, Trae, cream, and sugar are tabooed, and the gentlemen who tenant this terrestrial Eden let the blessed beverage drawn from the choicest growths of the Celestial Empire jast touch their palates, and no more. Werea tenth of whit is filled into te delicate lithe cups poured into the most robust system, Hlyson's la Mincing-lane would be more deadly to its youthful unmates than Hyson's at Hongkong As it is, to the male uninitiated the summer life of these tea students seems afar from enviable one, The numerous young gentlemen are penned up in a vast chamber of horrors, lighted by the skylight in the midst of the leaden roof, where, with thermometer at 90 deg, and kettles sornering for ever over the perpetual fires, they are condemned in their future interests to be ceaselessly flirting the warm be-vorago through their lips, the fumes mounting to their brains with each sip they take, with each breath of loaded air they draw. Hyson gets handsome premiums with them, and is supposed to earn them. He is acknowledge' to have as delicate'a taste in teas as those relatives of Sancho Panza in wines—the tasters who detected in a sip the presence of the rusty key and the strip of leather at the bottom of the cask. The tea trade in its different branches intermarries a good deal, and tyson can put an abundance of business in. the way of his brother-in-law Canaster, who strictly limits himself to Wroking, and makes a very safe thing of it. Canaster and his brother-in-law inhabit adjacent mansions a few miles down the Great Eastern. No wonder one and the other have succeeded so well, for the is of both ar¢ absorbed in their professions. Passing a Sunday at Kaisow House is more profitable than pleasant for the articled youths in the office, when they are invited down there, It is hard for those who look on tea as relatively but a trifling unit in the sum of human concerns to conceive how men can consent to infuse their minds in it so absolutely as Hyson and Canaster. Morning, noon, and night, talk on teals draining from thole lips. 'They believe in it as Australian backweodsmen do. Hyson has gat a long stretch of glass, and devotes much time and capital to the cultivation' of the plant, although—so far as any practical purposes are concorned—hitherto with very moderate success.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.