Note 230 — Chapter XXXVII

Miss King, the head of a New York tea-dealing firm composed of women, who control a capital of $1,000,000, has recently gone to China to make purchases. Her previous business experience, as narrated by a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, explains her fitness for her mission, while it incidentally throws some light on the secrets of the tea-company business:

"Previous to the outbreak of our civil war Miss King was extensively engaged in utilizing the leaves of the great blackberry and raspberry crops running to waste in the rich lowlands of Georgia and Alabama, and kept in that fertile region a large levy of Northern women—smart, like herself—to superintend the gathering of the leaves and their preparation for shipment to headquarters in New York. These leaves were prepared for the market at their manipulating halls in one of the narrow streets on the Hudson side of New York city. Over this stage of the tea preparations Miss King had special supervision, and, by a generous use of the genuine imported teas, worked up our American productions into all the accredited varieties of the black and green teas of commerce. Here the female supervision apparently ended. In their extensive tea ware-rooms in Walker street the business was conducted by the shrewdest representatives of Gothamite trade, with all the appliances of the great Chinese tea-importing houses. Here were huge piles of tea-chests, assorted and unassorted, and the high-salaried tea-taster with his row of tiny cups of hot-drawn tea, delicately sampling and classifying the varieties and grades for market. The breaking out of the war stopped the Southern supplies and sent Miss King's female agents to their Northern homes. But the business was made to conform to the new order of things. Large cargoes of imported black teas were bought as they arrived and were skillfully manipulated into those high-cost varieties of green teas so extensively purchased by the government for its commissary and medical departments."