In A Candy Factory

From top to bottom the floors of the factory ure covered with tiles, and I notic'ed that they were people in all parts of the building washing a nd scrubbing these tiled floors. For a candy-faetm-y it was tlie least BÜcky or snieary I ever éaw. Absolute cleanlinesa and sweetness was the rule. There was a slight drift sugar about, as iu a mili where wheat is being ground, and your coat might get a little powdered, but there always was sweeping going on. Chocolate-ma king I need not describe only to state that everything was done liere by machinery, for the chocolate as produced enters for a large percentage into the bonbons manufactured. In the sugar-plum departments handwork seemed to be constant. Tidylooking young women, all caps on, were working away, each one with a little saucepan before her full of sugar; the sugar was in a pasty eondition, the heat being deriyed from steam. In these saucepans were colored sugars of all the hues of the rainbow. The work-women would take up an almond or a pistachenut, and drop it in the saucepan, then flsh it out with a bit of wire fashioned inloopform. The art was to get just the proper coating. Then with a dexterous niotion of the wrist the sugarplum would be placed in a tin pan, and with deftmotion of the wire loop a coating would be given the top of it. There were some very small sugar-plums, and it would take two hundred of them to raake a pound. They were all exact in form. These little things, so the foreman told me, had gone through ten processes before they had arrived at their present eondition. Some of the BUgarplunas were made iu moulds. There was pure legerdemain about these. A iiuiu took a íiinnel, and dropped the sugar, just it the crystalizing point. in to moulds. . Tlicy were very small things, nol inore thaii an inch long by half an Inch wide, but the cóufetioner never poured a drop in the wrong place. Dear me ! if I tried to do that I should mak e a precious muss of it. Here were sugar-plums of many shades, every work-woman seeming to have a specialty. It was sometbing not alone requiring alertness of hand, but constant watchfulness as to the eondition of. the material used. If it had been too soft, the bonbon would have run and been out of shape. If the sugar paste had been too hard, it would have been intractable. How they tnanaged not to burn anything was a wonder. -