vault you come to a circular building without
any entrance. It is the root and foundation
of the Queen's Pipe. Quitting the vault, and
ascending into the warehouse over it, you
find that you are in the great Tobacco
Warehouse, called the Queen's Warehouse,
because the Government rent the Tobacco
Warehouses here for fourteen thousand pounds
per annum. This one warehouse has no equal
in any other part of the world. It is five acres
in extent, and yet it is covered with a roof,
the framework of which is of iron, erected we
believe, by Mr. Barry, the architect of the New
Houses of Parliament, and of so light and
skilful a construction, that it admits of a view
of the whole place; and so slender are the
pillars, that the roof seems almost to hang
upon nothing.  Under this roof is piled a vast
mass of tobacco in huge casks, in double
tiers; that is, two casks in height. This
warehouse is said to hold, when full, twenty-
four thousand hogsheads, averaging one thousand
two hundred pounds each, and equal to
thirty thousand tons of general merchandise.
Each cask is said to be worth, duty included,
two hundred pounds; giving a sum total of
tobacco in this one warehouse, when filled,
of four millions eight hundred thousand
pounds in value!  Besides this, there is
another warehouse of nearly equal size,
where finer kinds of tobacco are
deposited, many of them in packages of buffalo-
hide, marked "Giron," and Manilla for
cheroots, in packages of sacking lined with
palmetto leaves.  There is still another
warehouse for cigars, called the Cigar Floor, in
which there are frequently one thousand five
hundred chests, valued at one hundred pounds
each, at an average, or one hundred and fifty
thousand pounds in cigars alone.

The scene in the Queen's Warehouse, to
which we return, is very singular. Long
streets stretch right and left between the
walls of tobacco-casks; and when the men are
absent at one of their meals, you find yourself
in an odd sort of solitude, and in an
atmosphere  of tobacco. Every one of these giant
hogsheads is stripped twice from the tobacco
during its stay in this warehouse; once on
entrance, to weigh it; and again before leaving,
to ascertain whether the mass is uninjured;
and to weigh what is found good for the duty,
and for the sale price to the merchant.  Thus
the coopers take all these hogsheads twice to
pieces, and put them together again. This
tobacco is of the strong coarse kind, for
pigtail, shag, snuff, &c. The finer kinds, as we
have said, go to the other warehouse.

But your eye is now attracted by a guidepost,
on which is painted, in large letters,
"TO THE KILN." Following this direction,
you arrive at the centre of the warehouse, and
at the Queen's Pipe.  You enter a door on
which is rudely painted the crown royal and
the initials "V. R." and find yourself in a
room of considerable size, in the centre of
which towers up the kiln; a furnace of the
conical kind, like a glass-house or porcelain
furnace. On the door of the furnace is again
painted the crown and the " V. R."   Here
you find, in the furnace, a huge mass of fire,
and around are heaps of damaged tobacco, tea,
and other articles ready to be flung upon it,
as it admits of it. This fire never goes out,
day or night, from year to year. There is an
attendant who supplies it with its fuel, as it
can take it; and men, during the day time,
constantly coming laden with great loads of
tobacco; cigars, and other stuff, condemned to
the flames. Whatever is forfeited, and is too
bad for sale, be it what it will, is doomed to
the kiln. At the other Docks damaged goods,
we were assured, are buried till they are
partly rotten, and then taken up and disposed
of as rubbish or manure.   Here the Queen's
Pipe smokes all up, except the greater
quantity of the tea, which, having some time ago
set the chimney of the kiln on fire, is now
rarely burnt.   And strange are the things
that sometimes come to this perpetually
burning furnace.  On one occasion, the
attendant informed us, he burnt nine hundred
Australian mutton-hams. These were
warehoused before the duty came off. The owner
suffered them to remain till the duty ceased, in
hopes of their being exempt from it; but
this not being allowed, they were left till
so damaged as to be unsaleable.  Yet a good
many, the man declared, were excellent;
and he often made a capital addition to his
breakfast from the roast that, for some time,
was so odoriferously going on. On another
occasion he burnt thirteen thousand pairs of
condemned French gloves.

In one department of the place often lie
many tons of the ashes from the furnace,
which are sold by auction, by the ton, to
gardeners and farmers, as manure, and for
killing insects, to soap-boilers and chemical
manufacturers.   In a corner are generally
piled cart-loads of nails, and other pieces of
iron, which have been swept up from the floors,
or have remained in the broken pieces of
casks and boxes which go to the kiln. Those
which have been sifted from the ashes are
eagerly bought up by gunsmiths, sorted, and
used in the manufacture of gun-barrels, for
which they are highly esteemed, as possessing
a toughness beyond all other iron, and therefore
calculated pre-eminently to prevent
bursting.  Gold and silver, too, are not
unfrequently found amongst these ashes; for many
manufactured articles, if unsaleable, are
broken up, and thrown in. There have
sometimes, indeed, been vast numbers of
foreign watches, professing themselves to be
gold watches, but being gross impostors,
which have been ground up in a mill, and
then flung in here.

Such is the Queen's Tobacco-Pipe, unique
of its kind, and in its capacity of consumption.
None of the other Docks have anything like
it. It stands alone. It is the Pipe — and as
we have said, establishes the Queen of